Setting up the stage

In the previous chapter, we discussed the basics of Elastic Stack and its installation, but after the installation, we need to understand the process of creating different visualizations in Kibana. So, I am going to create our first demonstration for working with Kibana in which I will cover the complete flow through which you will be able to understand how Kibana can read log data and create beautiful dashboards from bulky, unorganized log files. For this demonstration, I am going to use Apache log data, and to get that data, we will follow these steps:

1. Configure Logstash to fetch data from the Apache log file
2. Output the log data into Elasticsearch
3. Configure Kibana to read the Elasticsearch index
4. Create demo visualizations with Apache log data