Course review: Beginner's Crash Course to Elastic Stack Series

Course by Lisa Jung @ Elastic available on Youtube and Github

The Elastic Stack consists of kibana, elasticsearch, beats and logstash. With Elastic Stack you can take data from any source, in any format, then search, analyze and visualize it in real time.

This is a course review of two different courses on Elasticsearch & Kibana by Lisa Jung:

1. 6 Recorded live sessions of about 60 minutes each

2. 22 Mini videos recorded for educational purpose that are more to the point. These are about 5 to 15 minutes long each.

Before we jump into the course review, let’s discuss what Elastic is and how it’s different to SQL.

How is Elasticsearch different from SQL?

Elasticsearch is a NoSQL database or a document oriented database. In Elasticsearch you must index the entire object graph you want to search and before indexing your document they must be denormalized. Denormalize information means that information like a customer name is stored together with each document of a customer order. This takes up alot more space but increase retrieval performance since no joins is needed after the denormalization. However, if you want to change the customer name, the change needs to be made on all documents of orders in Elastic. Compare it to SQL where you often have the customer name in a single cell in a single table, require almost no work to make an update.

Elastic is great for “write-once-read-many-workloads” and sites like Tripadvisor uses Elastic to get high performance on their website even with many concurrent users.

Here is a great blog post on a bit more technical level about how Elastic works by Alex Brasetvik at Elastic.

Sooner or later, you will need to read the Elasticsearch Guide.

Course overview of Beginner's Crash Course to Elastic Stack Series

The course Beginner's Crash Course to Elastic Stack Series is in 6 parts, each taking about 1 hour. You find the repo on Github here and the Youtube videos below:

The instructor has also made a mini series of the same course here:

Course table of contents for the long version with 6 episodes

• Part 1: Intro to Elasticsearch and Kibana

• Part 2: Understanding the Relevance of Your Search with Elasticsearch and Kibana

• Part 3: Running Full Text Queries and Combined Queries with Elasticsearch and Kibana

• Part 4: Running Aggregations with Elasticsearch and Kibana

• Part 5: Understanding Mapping with Elasticsearch and Kibana

• Part 6: Troubleshooting Beginner Level Elasticsearch Errors

This course is made up of 6 recorded live sessions of about 1 hour each.

The table of content of the mini course is easiest accessed by looking at the Youtube video list.

The actual course review of Beginner's Crash Course to Elastic Stack Series

I didn’t know much about Elastic before I started watching this course. I watched the version with 6 long episodes first before I checked out the mini videos.

Lisa Jung has a good energy and a comfortable voice to listen to. She is excellent in explaining and showing how everything works but she tends to spend a bit too much time on each thing for my liking. For example, in lesson 4 on aggregations, she shows both how to do a sum, min and mean aggregation with three separate examples where only the aggregate function is changed. I’m sure that’s helpful if you are very new to programming at large but for me I wanted to skip ahead and watch the next thing.

For me, the mini videos is a much better fit in this sense. They are more straight to the point and if I had knew about them from the beginning, I would probably have skipped the longer version.

This course is very much of a tutorial where you can copy-paste everything from the instructors repo to the Kibana console while you listen to the instructions. I think this is a good way to learn something new for the first time. However, instead of just copy-paste, it might be a good idea to pause the video and actually type a bit of the commands yourself in order to remember them even better.

Facts about Elastic’s Beginner's Crash Course to Elastic Stack Series

• It’s completely free, both the course and Elasticsearch software

• You run everything in your browser if you chose the 14 days trial in the cloud. Otherwise you get help on how to install and run everything on your own computer.

• No exercises, just copy-paste and follow the instructions along with the instructor.

• This course takes about 6 hours to complete, the same length as the videos.

• Instructor is Lisa Jung from Elastic.