All the tools in ELK Stack and its ecosystem are in an active development phase, and new updates are being pushed regularly. It's evolving rapidly to suit the needs of modern enterprise applications.
Elasticsearch is widely used across companies in various use cases, and its ecosystem and plugins are evolving very rapidly. With a wide range of plugins available for various tasks involving Elasticsearch, it is becoming more and more adaptable to a variety of use cases.
Note
All plugins and integrations are documented here:
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/plugins/current/index.html
Logstash is probably the most active development among ELK Stack tools. The development team and community are working hard to make the tool more enterprise grade by adding more resiliency, robustness, and maintainability features.
Logstash 1.5.x has already made significant changes related to plugin management and development. The following are the capabilities being added in coming versions of Logstash.
Currently we need to use a message broker, such as Redis, and so on, to throttle the event queue or to save losing the events in the pipeline. The upcoming versions of Logstash are going to add the capability of persisting the events queue to disk to avoid loss of data in case of plugin crash or restart.
The current Logstash implementation lacks the capability of acknowledging the message across end-to-end systems. The upcoming versions of Logstash are planned to include notification of failed events, and so on, so that events can be replayed or handled.
The Logstash process currently lacks the support to monitor the installation, and to track event successes and failures, in the pipeline. Monitoring API planned in future releases is aimed at providing these capabilities.
Also, currently, if you need to change any configuration, you need to change the Logstash configuration file, and the system needs a restart to take the change in to effect. The Logstash management API is planned to overcome this limitation so that configuration can be updated dynamically without interrupting the pipeline.
Note
More capabilities that are being added to Logstash can be tracked at https://github.com/elastic/logstash/labels/roadmap.
Kibana is getting more and more useful with a variety of use cases now utilizing the tool with ELK Stack, and also the integration with many other systems. With increasing use of analysis on a variety of data, new chart types, and aggregations are being added. The following are some of the recent capabilities added to the platform in version 4.1:
- The ability to build a bubble chart, derived from Line chart
- Field formatting options in Settings.
- Kibana objects (dashboards, charts and searches) can now be imported and exported as well.
Note
You can track more new enhancements in Kibana here https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/releasenotes.html.