Elastic stack in action for smart cities: Making sense of big data

Having good decision support is absolutely necessary nowadays because of the need to improve and gain value. For any organization, it is vital to obtain value from anything it can and having huge amounts of data, Big Data,_pushes them to do so. But only having Big Data is not enough. The most important thing is to use it smartly in order to gain valuable decision support. Making sense of Big Data would happen when we are able to use all the data we have and get important hints and directions. The impediment in the Big Data concept is to obtain support as fast it can be obtained, in real time if possible and the solution used needs to be very malleable because of information technology evolution. Because of this evolution and because of the ease in managing data with Elastic Stack we chose to use Elastic Stack to manage Big Data. The process of making sense of Big Data is based on three big steps: collect, process and use. In order to do so and to make sense of all of this, this paper proposes to use an Elastic Stack solution, also known as ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana), to easily and rapidly manage the Big Data problem. The purpose of making sense of Big Data is succeeding to extract valuable information to stand as decision support. In order to achieve that purpose and obtain valuable information from Big Data all components are used to process data and analyze the result to offer support for decision making.