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[[power-of-logstash]]
== The Power of Logstash

*The ingestion workhorse for Elasticsearch and more*

Horizontally scalable data processing pipeline with strong Elasticsearch and Kibana synergy

*Pluggable pipeline architecture*

Mix, match, and orchestrate different inputs, filters, and outputs to play in pipeline harmony

*Community-extensible and developer-friendly plugin ecosystem*

Over 200 plugins available, plus the flexibility of creating and contributing your own

image:static/images/logstash.png[]

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== Logstash Loves Data

Collect more, so you can know more. Logstash welcomes data of all shapes and sizes.

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=== Logs and Metrics

Where it all started.

* Handle all types of logging data
** Easily ingest a multitude of web logs like {logstash-ref}/advanced-pipeline.html[Apache], and application
logs like {logstash-ref}/plugins-inputs-log4j.html[log4j] for Java
** Capture many other log formats like {logstash-ref}/plugins-inputs-syslog.html[syslog],
{logstash-ref}/plugins-inputs-eventlog.html[Windows event logs], networking and firewall logs, and more
* Enjoy complementary secure log forwarding capabilities with https://www.elastic.co/products/beats/filebeat[Filebeat]
* Collect metrics from {logstash-ref}/plugins-inputs-ganglia.html[Ganglia], {logstash-ref}/plugins-codecs-collectd.html[collectd],
{logstash-ref}/plugins-codecs-netflow.html[NetFlow], {logstash-ref}/plugins-inputs-jmx.html[JMX], and many other infrastructure
and application platforms over {logstash-ref}/plugins-inputs-tcp.html[TCP] and {logstash-ref}/plugins-inputs-udp.html[UDP]

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=== The Web

Unlock the World Wide Web.

* Transform {logstash-ref}/plugins-inputs-http.html[HTTP requests] into events
** Consume from web service firehoses like {logstash-ref}/plugins-inputs-twitter.html[Twitter] for social sentiment analysis
** Webhook support for GitHub, HipChat, JIRA, and countless other applications
** Enables many https://www.elastic.co/products/x-pack/alerting[Watcher] alerting use cases
* Create events by polling {logstash-ref}/plugins-inputs-http_poller.html[HTTP endpoints] on demand
** Universally capture health, performance, metrics, and other types of data from web application interfaces
** Perfect for scenarios where the control of polling is preferred over receiving

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=== Data Stores and Streams

Discover more value from the data you already own.

* Better understand your data from any relational database or NoSQL store with a
{logstash-ref}/plugins-inputs-jdbc.html[JDBC] interface 
* Unify diverse data streams from messaging queues like Apache {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-kafka.html[Kafka],
{logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-rabbitmq.html[RabbitMQ], {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-sqs.html[Amazon SQS], and {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-zeromq.html[ZeroMQ]

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=== Sensors and IoT

Explore an expansive breadth of other data.

* In this age of technological advancement, the massive IoT world unleashes endless use cases through capturing and
harnessing data from connected sensors.
* Logstash is the common event collection backbone for ingestion of data shipped from mobile devices to intelligent
homes, connected vehicles, healthcare sensors, and many other industry specific applications.

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== Easily Enrich Everything

The better the data, the better the knowledge. Clean and transform your data during ingestion to gain near real-time
insights immediately at index or output time. Logstash comes out-of-box with many aggregations and mutations along
with pattern matching, geo mapping, and dynamic lookup capabilities.

* {logstash-ref}/plugins-filters-grok.html[Grok] is the bread and butter of Logstash filters and is used ubiquitously to derive
structure out of unstructured data. Enjoy a wealth of integrated patterns aimed to help quickly resolve web, systems,
networking, and other types of event formats.
* Expand your horizons by deciphering {logstash-ref}/plugins-filters-geoip.html[geo coordinates] from IP addresses, normalizing
{logstash-ref}/plugins-filters-date.html[date] complexity, simplifying {logstash-ref}/plugins-filters-kv.html[key-value pairs] and
{logstash-ref}/plugins-filters-csv.html[CSV] data, {logstash-ref}/plugins-filters-fingerprint.html[fingerprinting](anonymizing) sensitive information,
and further enriching your data with {logstash-ref}/plugins-filters-translate.html[local lookups] or Elasticsearch
{logstash-ref}/plugins-filters-elasticsearch.html[queries].
* Codecs are often used to ease the processing of common event structures like {logstash-ref}/plugins-codecs-json.html[JSON]
and {logstash-ref}/plugins-codecs-multiline.html[multiline] events.

See {logstash-ref}/transformation.html[Transforming Data] for an overview of some of the popular data processing plugins.

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== Choose Your Stash

Route your data where it matters most. Unlock various downstream analytical and operational use cases by storing,
analyzing, and taking action on your data.

*Analysis*

* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-elasticsearch.html[Elasticsearch]
* Data stores such as {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-mongodb.html[MongoDB] and {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-riak.html[Riak]

*Archiving*

* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-webhdfs.html[HDFS]
* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-s3.html[S3]
* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-google_cloud_storage.html[Google Cloud Storage]

*Monitoring*

* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-nagios.html[Nagios]
* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-ganglia.html[Ganglia]
* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-zabbix.html[Zabbix]
* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-graphite.html[Graphite]
* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-datadog.html[Datadog]
* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-cloudwatch.html[CloudWatch]

*Alerting*

* https://www.elastic.co/products/watcher[Watcher] with Elasticsearch
* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-email.html[Email]
* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-pagerduty.html[Pagerduty]
* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-hipchat.html[HipChat]
* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-irc.html[IRC]
* {logstash-ref}/plugins-outputs-sns.html[SNS]
