Introduction to Logstash

Logstash started as a brainchild project of Jordan Sissel, who has a background in operations and system administration. He was always challenged to find insights from logs. Once, he wanted to stream a large number of logs per second, however, he was unable to find a suitable free tool or project fit for his use case. At that time, he took the challenge into his hands and started building Logstash to provide a tool for users to handle the streaming of large numbers of logs per second; and combined it with powerful functionalities to fetch relevant information from the logs. One of the premises of Logstash was to build a centralized system to gather logs from multiple systems so that managing logs from multiple sources became easy for further processing and aggregating the logs.

Logstash started as an inpidual product but later, as Elasticsearch was growing, Jordan Sissel joined Elastic. to develop Logstash actively. Since then, there has been no looking back, as Logstash has become a core component of Elastic Stack, creating a comprehensive platform for collecting data from multiple sources, logging data, analyzing log data, storing the data, and visualizing the data as a single pipeline connected with multiple components. Logstash has some powerful functionalities and real-time data collection capabilities, which makes it a comprehensive tool for processing logs. Logstash is an open source log-management tool that is part of Elastic Stack, providing a fully open source solution for end-to-end log management.