Log Analytics Platform — ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Docker) overview

A centralized log analytics platform built on the ELK stack where Elasticsearch indexes and searches structured log data, Kibana provides dashboards and ad-hoc exploration, and Fluent Bit collects and forwards logs from application containers. Docker Compose orchestrates the local development stack while Kubernetes Helm charts manage production deployment. Prometheus monitors the ELK cluster health itself. Designed for platform and SRE teams centralizing observability across microservice architectures. The tradeoff is resource intensity — Elasticsearch clusters are memory-hungry and require careful index lifecycle management, shard sizing, and retention policies to prevent storage costs from growing unboundedly with log volume.