Questions on getting started with ELK

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
#1

For reference, I have followed this guide to get me started:

Hello, I'm extremely new to ELK, as in I have just now installed everything, as I will be needing it for a research project.

My current goal is to be able to upload log files onto Elasticsearch and be able to query/organize the data, but I am having some issues.

First, I am not sure why but when I go to http://localhost:5601/ , Kibana doesn't show up but rather the Elastic dashboard comes up. Not sure if this is a problem but if it is, how may I be able to fix it?

Second, I tried to use the home page for ElasticStack anyways and went to 'Add Data' and chose Apache Logs with Filebeat. It produced a 'Getting Started' tutorial, where the second step, (after installing filebeat) is to 'Edit the Configuration', and I have to modify /etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml and insert

output.elasticsearch: hosts: ["<es_url>"] username: "elastic" password: "<password>" setup.kibana: host: "<kibana_url>"

I'm lost on how to modify the above text, I don't think I have a kibana username/password, and what do I replace "<es_url>" and "<kibana_url>" with?

Any help/advice would be appreciated, thank you!

#2

Welcome to our community! :smiley:

I'd encourage you to follow Getting Started [7.10] | Elastic. There's things in that article that don't make sense, like using nginx for access control, as that's free functionality :slight_smile:

When you say the Elasticsearch dashboards come up, can you post a screenshot of what you mean?

For the second one, that's because that tutorial doesn't setup the native access control. From what I can see in that article you can leave the username and password out and it should work.

#3

Thank you for the getting started article, I'll be going through it and fixing whatever I can, to get it working!

This is what comes up when I go to localhost:5601

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I pressed that add data button under HOME and this is what shows up, where I chose the second option 'Apache logs'. Which I'm now not sure if this would be the correct selection if I jut want to upload log files from my downloads?

But after that screen I am given the Filebeats installation tutorial.

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Thank you for your help, I really appreciate it!

#4

If the log files are Apache ones, yes. It will prompt you to install Filebeat to ingest them, you don't upload them via Kibana directly.