Hello everyone! We're working on arranging our next meetup in Minneapolis. For now, the DevOps Minneapolis User Group has some great ELK stack information on offer during their upcoming Lightning Talks session. We're also sending along some stickers for all the attendees, so if you'd like to kit out your notebook then make sure to head to the meetup!

Please RSVP in the DevOps Minneapolis Meetup group to attend these sessions!

http://www.meetup.com/DevOps-Minneapolis/events/221149690/

Here's the mentioned ELK stack lightning talk:

ELK Stack: How? When? Why? 

Vern Burton (@vern_burton) is a Senior Systems Engineer (Device Cloud) at Digi International Inc. 

The need for centralized logs has become a need/want in many organizations.  I will cover the concept of building a ELK stack which contains Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana, and demonstrate the usefulness on how such a solution can help you lower your time to repair as well as help with creating visualizations of your log data. I will also briefly touch on Elasticsearch maintenance so that you can automate the deletion, closing, etc. of indexes that this solution depends on so you don't run out of space or allow index to become detrimental on your Elasticsearch cluster.  I will also cover the concept of total cost of ownership between ELK and the leading commercial solution, Splunk.