Building an Observability Pipeline with the Elastic Stack
Building an Observability Pipeline with the Elastic Stack

Building an Observability Pipeline with the Elastic Stack

Author
Shiv Bade
Tags
observability
elk
logging
Published
October 2, 2017
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Setting up observability is a journey, not a feature toggle. Around this time, I started consolidating logs, metrics, and traces into a cohesive pipeline. The ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) was my weapon of choice.
The setup involved: - Filebeat agents on application nodes - Logstash pipelines for transformation and enrichment - Elasticsearch for storage and indexing - Kibana dashboards for insights

Lessons Learned:

  • Keep Logstash filters simple — they’re deceptively hard to debug.
  • Use structured logging early. JSON logs save your sanity later.
  • Index lifecycle policies help manage storage costs over time.
Observability isn't about pretty dashboards. It's about finding the "why" when something breaks — and getting there before your users do.