<b>ELK for access logs: a curated starting path</b>

<b>ELK for access logs: a curated starting path</b>
Elasticsearch + Kibana is overkill for some, perfect for others. Five honest references.

→ <b>Elastic's Filebeat nginx module docs</b> — pre-built parsing and dashboards; you're querying bots in an hour, not a week.
→ <b>grok debugger (Elastic)</b> — test your log-line pattern before it silently drops malformed lines.
★ <b>Pick of the week — Daniel Berman's "parsing access logs with Logstash"</b> — the cleanest grok pattern for combined format plus a geoip + user-agent filter chain that classifies bots on ingest.
→ <b>Kibana Lens tutorials</b> — building a "Googlebot hits per URL path" viz without writing query DSL.
→ <b>Elastic's data-stream + ILM guide</b> — auto-roll indices so storage doesn't explode.

Takeaway: use the Filebeat module's defaults first. Only hand-roll grok when your format is non-standard.