While this book starts from the ground up in terms of instructions on installation and configuration of the Elastic Stack and the ML feature, it is helpful to have prior experience of setting up and using the Elastic Stack or a similar big data analysis platform.

While the majority of product installation and utilization can be managed by means of a personal computer/laptop (that meets the minimum specifications), the reader can also register for a free trial setup on https://cloud.elastic.co/login?redirectTo=%2Fdeployments if that is logistically easier.

No prior experience of IT and/or security operations is necessary to get the most out of this book, but many topics and concepts are written with a view to addressing the plight of an operations analyst.

Many examples shown in this book use demo data sets that are available on the GitHub repository for this book. However, some examples (in Chapter 3, Event Change Detection and Chapter 5, Security Analytics with Elastic Machine Learning for example) use datasets that could not be distributed publicly. In those cases, you can either replicate the examples using similar kinds of data sets (that is, web access logs) or just follow along conceptually.