elk-stack

An Ansible Container project that stands up a fully functioning Elastic (or ELK) Stack using Docker containers.

Use this project as a starting point for your own ELK Stack project by running the following:

# Create an empty project directory
$ mkdir my-elk-stack 

# Set the current working directory to the new project directory
$ cd my-elk-stack

# Initialize your new project with this project
$ ansible-container init choucknecht.elk-stack-container

You now have your own elk-stack project that you can customize to fit your needs. If you're not sure where to start, take a look at the following:

container.yml

The orchestration document containing the Docker Compose used to build and run the application.

main.yml

The Ansible playbook used to build the application images. Install more logstash plugins, add custom indexes, and make any other changes by adding additional tasks and roles to this playbook.

Ansible Container docs

Visit the docs site to learn more about using Ansible Container to build apps using Docker containers.

Running the application

You can run the application with sample data or without. If you wish to load some sample Apache log data, modify main.yml by setting create_example: true. The modified file will look like:

  - role: create_example
    create_example: true

To run the application, build the Docker images for the app, then run the app using the newly built images. It's as simple as executing the following commands:

# Set the working directory to your project root
$ cd my-elk-stack

# Build the elk-stack Docker images
$ ansible-container build

# Run the elk-stack application using the new images
$ ansible-container run

Access the Kibana web server

Once you have the ELK stack running, you can access the Kibana server on port 5601 of your Docker Engine host. If you're running Docker Machine, you should be able to do the following from a terminal session, replacing the word default with the name of your Docker Machine instance:

$ open http://$(docker-machine ip default):5601

View the sample data

If you loaded the sample Apache data, go to Settings > Indices, and change the Index name or pattern value to apache_elk_example. When it becomes visible, click the green Create button. Click on the Discover menu at the top of the page to view the data.

Load the sample dashboard

If you loaded the sample Apache data, the sample dashboard provides a cool example of how to create visualizations in Kibana. To access it you'll need to import the dashboard config file by going to Settings > Objects, and clicking Import. Select the apache_kibana.json file found in the root directory of your project. After the file loads, click the Dashboard menu option at the top of the page to see the sample dashbaord:

Requirements

• Ansible Container

Dependencies

Uses the following roles, which are automatically installed when you run ansible-container build:

• chouseknecht.elasticsearch-container
• chouseknecht.logstash-container
• chouseknecht.kibana-container

Author

@chouseknecht