Getting Started with Beats and the Elastic Stackedit

Looking for an "ELK tutorial" that shows how to set up the Elastic stack for Beats? You’ve come to the right place. The topics in this section describe how to install and configure the Elastic stack for Beats.

A regular Beats setup consists of:

See the Elastic Support Matrix for information about supported operating systems and product compatibility.

To get started, you can install Elasticsearch and Kibana on a single VM or even on your laptop. The only condition is that the machine must be accessible from the servers you want to monitor. As you add more Beats and your traffic grows, you’ll want to replace the single Elasticsearch instance with a cluster. You’ll probably also want to automate the installation process.