ELK: Ruminating on logs

Could have used more explanation at the top about why I would want to implement the ELK stack. We jumped pretty quickly into installation and configuration details without much of a product overview.

Great overview! - I'd like some real world examples of how data collected is used for business processes or troubleshooting

Interesting talk, and Mathew is a great speaker. I'd love to see another of his talks. The only downside of this talk is endemic to the topic itself - there's sort of a bewildering array of components and plugins connected with the ELK stack. I came away from the talk feeling more informed as a developer, but as part of a small business I'm now also more hesitant to jump in.

This felt a little rushed. It was a good overview of the tools, but I don't know that I could walk away from this and do much with the information I got out of it. It might be too much to cover in one talk, maybe narrowing it down to just one of these tools would be more helpful.

The intro needs a redo. I've used splunk at work for a couple years and did a little homework reading about elasticsearch, logstash, and kibana before I went to the talk, but was confused by the first 5 minutes or so. Too many components and concepts too fast; I would pick one of the three or four layers of the ELK (and Beats and Brokers) stack and talk only about it before moving on to another.

I did really appreciate it overall though, because a talk like yours is probably the best and quickest way to get a sense of what you're getting yourself into in terms of time and knowledge commitment with ELK, and the talk as a whole did convey that pretty well.

I agree with Les Lim, and actually all of the reviews prior to mine....

This is a complex topic and I feel like there is much to be gained from the experts in the community who are implenting these systems, however, and contrary to the intentions of Mathew Beane, all I could hear in my head for most of the presentation was "logz.io". He plugged it early on, and I'm thankful, but the more he explained, the more he admitted the elaborateness of the ELK stack and all of the complexities to managing such a stack. When I felt myself treading water I continued to revert to his early statement of "logz.io".

I can understand the need for managing this on your own, however not much reason for doing so was presented. As such a complex topic, I would recommend either staying in high level theory and need based use-case scenarios or drilling into the specifics of a portion of the material.

Granted, I may be ill educated and exposed to this area of development, but I believe the purpose is to empower and inspire, right?

I found this talk extremely useful. I wasn't aware of what tools are out there. I liked the voice of experience explaining where the pain points are likely to be. I found the slides at http://www.slideshare.net/aepod/elk-ruminating-on-logs?qid=6b516199-bb6c-4e4c-8b0e-495d983d0062

Mathew gave a great presentation and kept our interest. The topic was very complex; this could have been a 3 hour talk easily. Similar to Les' comment below - provide more overview of components, what they do and why we'd want to use them and less time on configuration.