- Logstash is a tool for managing logs that allows logs to be parsed, enriched, and output to various destinations like Elasticsearch or Graphite.
- It uses plugins to handle input, filtering, and output of logs. Common input plugins include files, TCP, and Twitter streams. Filtering plugins like Grok and date are useful for parsing and structuring log data. Outputs include Elasticsearch, StatsD, and cloud services.
- Logstash can be used to centralize logging from diverse systems, analyze social media streams, and capture system metrics. It helps make logs more machine-parseable and enables capabilities like visualization with Kibana. Scaling Logstash requires techniques like queues to process logs horizontally.