ELK Stack - Log Analytics and Observability Platform

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Stop Spending Days Configuring ELK - Launch a Secure Observability Platform in Minutes

DevOps engineers, SREs, and platform teams need centralized log analytics without weeks of manual setup. This ELK Stack AMI delivers Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana fully installed, configured, and secured on a single EC2 instance - so you go from launch to your first Kibana dashboard in minutes, not days.

## Who This Is For

This AMI is built for startups and SMBs running workloads on AWS who need observability without dedicating a team to manage Elastic clusters. If your team already runs Filebeat or Metricbeat agents on EC2 instances and needs a central destination for logs and metrics, this stack is ready to receive that data immediately after launch.

## What You Get

• Elasticsearch 8.x - Distributed search and storage backend on TCP9200 with TLS encryption enabled by default (Elasticsearch 8.x ships with security on) and HTTP authentication
• Logstash 8.x - Ingestion pipeline with a Beats input on TCP 5044, ready for Filebeat and Metricbeat agents shipping logs from your fleet
• Kibana 8.x - Visual analytics UI on TCP 5601, fronted by nginx reverse proxy on TCP 80 with HTTP basic authentication
• Conservative JVM heaps tuned for a4 GB instance with drop-in configuration files for easy scaling

## Secure by Default

On first boot, a one-shot systemd service automatically rotates the Elasticsearch "elastic" superuser password and generates a fresh nginx basic-auth password - both unique to your instance and written to a root-only file. No shared or default credentials ship in the image. Elasticsearch 8.x TLS is enabled for encrypted client-to-node communication in transit.

Recommended security practices:

• Enable EBS encryption for data at rest
• Place the instance in a VPC private subnet behind an Application Load Balancer
• Restrict security group ingress to ports 80, 5044, and 9200 from trusted CIDR ranges only

## Example Workflow: Centralizing Application Logs

A development team running a web application across multiple EC2 instances can install Filebeat on each node to ship nginx access logs and application logs to this ELK instance on port 5044. Within Kibana, the team builds dashboards tracking request latency, 5xx error rates, and traffic patterns - then configures alerts for anomalies. The entire pipeline from raw log line to visual dashboard requires no additional infrastructure.

## Use Cases

• Centralized log aggregation and full-text search across distributed services
• Infrastructure monitoring and observability with Metricbeat system metrics
• Application performance analytics with latency and error tracking
• Security event analysis and lightweight SIEM for audit trails
• Business analytics and KPI dashboards from structured log data

## AWS Integration

Deploy on any EC2 instance type. Pair with EBS volumes for persistent index storage. Use security groups to control network access. Compatible with AWS Systems Manager for instance management and CloudWatch for host-level monitoring alongside ELK application metrics.

## cloudimg 24/7 Support

Every subscription includes expert technical support from cloudimg engineers available around the clock via email and live chat. Get help with ELK deployment, ingestion pipeline authoring, index lifecycle management, Kibana dashboard creation, and performance tuning. Critical issues receive a one-hour average response time.

## Get Started

Launch the AMI, SSH into your instance, retrieve your unique credentials from the root-only file, and browse to your instance IP to access Kibana. Point your Beats agents at port 5044 and start exploring your data.

Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana and ELK are trademarks of Elasticsearch B.V. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.