In this article I’m going to show you how to easily monitor the rate at which Logstash is ingesting data, as well as in future articles the rate at which Elasticsearch is indexing it. It’s a nice little touch to add to any project involving Logstash, and it’s easy to do.

Logstash is powerful tool for data ingest, processing, and distribution. It originated as simply the pipe to slurp at log files and put them into Elasticsearch, but has evolved into a whole bunch more. With connectors to JDBC and Kafka, as well as many other input and output options (not to mention the filtering possibilities), it really is a great bit of software to use. I’ve used it over the years with OBIEE, as well as more recently to pull data from Oracle, and even IRC. Another great set of tools is InfluxDB and Grafana, which for me really round off the standalone Elastic platform (previously known as ELK - Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana). What InfluxDB and Grafana give is a powerful dedicated time series database and flexible time series-based dashboarding tool respectively. A topic for another day is the Elasticsearch vs InfluxDB overlap, and Kibana vs Grafana - but for now, just take it as read that it’s horses for course, right tool for the right job, etc.