﻿---
title: The Elastic Stack
description: This section provides an overview of the Elastic Stack and its components. What is the Elastic Stack? It’s a fast and highly scalable set of components...
url: https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/get-started/the-stack
products:
  - Elastic Stack
  - Kibana
---

# The Elastic Stack
This section provides an overview of the Elastic Stack and its components.


## An overview of the Elastic Stack

What is the Elastic Stack? It’s a fast and highly scalable set of components — Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, Logstash, and others — that together enable you to securely take data from any source, in any format, and then search, analyze, and visualize it.
The products in the Elasticsearch are designed to be used together and releases are synchronized to simplify the installation and upgrade process.
You have many options for deploying the Elastic Stack to suit your needs. You can deploy it on your own hardware, in the cloud, or use a managed service on Elastic Cloud.
<tip>
  To learn how to deploy Elasticsearch, Kibana, and supporting orchestration technologies, refer to [Deploy and manage](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/deploy-manage). To learn how to deploy additional ingest and consume components, refer to the documentation for the component.
</tip>

![Components of the Elastic Stack](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/get-started/images/stack-components-diagram.svg)

### Ingest

Elastic provides a number of components that ingest data. Collect and ship logs, metrics, and other types of data with Elastic Agent or Beats. Manage your Elastic Agents with Fleet. Collect detailed performance information with Elastic APM.
If you want to transform or enrich data before it’s stored, you can use Elasticsearch ingest pipelines or Logstash.
Trying to decide which ingest component to use? Refer to [Adding data to Elasticsearch](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/manage-data/ingest) to help you decide.

#### Fleet and Elastic Agent

Elastic Agent is a single, unified way to add monitoring for logs, metrics, and other types of data to a host. It can also protect hosts from security threats, query data from operating systems, forward data from remote services or hardware, and more. Each agent has a single policy to which you can add integrations for new data sources, security protections, and more.
Fleet enables you to centrally manage Elastic Agents and their policies. Use Fleet to monitor the state of all your Elastic Agents, manage agent policies, and upgrade Elastic Agent binaries or integrations.
[Learn more about Fleet and Elastic Agent](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/reference/fleet).

#### APM

Elastic APM is an application performance monitoring system built on the Elastic Stack. It allows you to monitor software services and applications in real-time, by collecting detailed performance information on response time for incoming requests, database queries, calls to caches, external HTTP requests, and more. This makes it easy to pinpoint and fix performance problems quickly. [Learn more about APM](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/solutions/observability/apm).

#### Beats

Beats are data shippers that you install as agents on your servers to send operational data to Elasticsearch. Beats are available for many standard observability data scenarios, including audit data, log files and journals, cloud data, availability, metrics, network traffic, and Windows event logs. [Learn more about Beats](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/beats/tree/main/reference).

#### Elasticsearch ingest pipelines

Ingest pipelines let you perform common transformations on your data before indexing them into Elasticsearch. You can configure one or more "processor" tasks to run sequentially, making specific changes to your documents before storing them in Elasticsearch. [Learn more about ingest pipelines](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/manage-data/ingest/transform-enrich/ingest-pipelines).

#### Logstash

Logstash is a data collection engine with real-time pipelining capabilities. It can dynamically unify data from disparate sources and normalize the data into destinations of your choice. Logstash supports a broad array of input, filter, and output plugins, with many native codecs further simplifying the ingestion process. [Learn more about Logstash](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/logstash/tree/main/reference).

### Store


#### Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is the distributed search and analytics engine at the heart of the Elastic Stack. It provides near real-time search and analytics for all types of data. Whether you have structured or unstructured text, numerical data, or geospatial data, Elasticsearch can efficiently store and index it in a way that supports fast searches. Elasticsearch provides a REST API that enables you to store data in Elasticsearch and retrieve it. The REST API also provides access to Elasticsearch's search and analytics capabilities. [Learn more about Elasticsearch](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/get-started).

### Consume

Use Kibana to query and visualize the data that’s stored in Elasticsearch. Or, use the Elasticsearch clients to access data in Elasticsearch directly from common programming languages.

#### Kibana

Kibana is the tool to harness your Elasticsearch data and to manage the Elastic Stack. Use it to analyze and visualize the data that’s stored in Elasticsearch. Kibana is also the home for the Search, Observability and Security solutions. [Learn more about Kibana](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/explore-analyze).

#### Elasticsearch clients

The clients provide a convenient mechanism to manage API requests and responses to and from Elasticsearch from popular languages such as Java, Ruby, Go, Python, and others. Both official and community contributed clients are available. [Learn more about the Elasticsearch clients](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/reference/elasticsearch-clients).

## Version compatibility

```
deployment:
  self:
```

When installing the Elastic Stack, you must use the same version across the entire stack. For example, if you are using Elasticsearch 9.2.1, you install Beats 9.2.1, APM Server 9.2.1, Elasticsearch Hadoop 9.2.1, Kibana 9.2.1, and Logstash 9.2.1.
If you’re upgrading an existing installation, see [Upgrade your deployment, cluster, or orchestrator](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/deploy-manage/upgrade) for information about how to ensure compatibility with 9.2.1.

## Installation order

```
deployment:
  self:
```

If you're deploying the Elastic Stack in a self-managed cluster, then install the Elastic Stack products you want to use in the following order:
- [Elasticsearch](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/deploy-manage/deploy/self-managed/installing-elasticsearch)
- [Kibana](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/deploy-manage/deploy/self-managed/install-kibana)
- [Logstash](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/logstash/tree/main/reference)
- [Elastic Agent](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/reference/fleet) or [Beats](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/beats/tree/main/reference)
- [APM](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/solutions/observability/apm)
- [Elasticsearch Hadoop](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/elasticsearch-hadoop/tree/main/reference)

Installing in this order ensures that the components each product depends on are in place.
<tip>
  If you're deploying a production environment and you plan to use [trusted CA-signed certificates](/elastic/docs-content/pull/3889/deploy-manage/security/self-setup#manual-configuration) for Elasticsearch, then you should do so before you deploy Fleet and Elastic Agent. If new security certificates are configured, any Elastic Agents need to be reinstalled, so we recommend that you set up Fleet and Elastic Agent with the appropriate certificates in place.
</tip>