Getting Started with Elastic Stack 9.x: The complete hands-on guide to building search, observability, and security solutions

by Grant Patterson, Emily McAlister, Asjad Athick

Master Elasticsearch v9.x to build AI-driven search, observability, and security solutions that scale effortlessly.

Key FeaturesMaster Elastic's search, observability, and security tools through practical implementationEnhance traditional capabilities with AI to deliver smarter, automated insightsBuild robust, scalable architectures validated by real-world resultsPurchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBookBook DescriptionIn Elastic Search AI Platform, you will learn to deliver fast, reliable Search, Observability, and Security solutions with Elasticsearch in the age of AI. The book starts by demystifying the platforms moving parts including indices, ingestion, pipelines, vector search, and deployments so you know what to use and why. You will practice the essentials through small, self contained exercises and build up to full workflows that ship to production.

Next you will go deep on ES QL, Elastics new query language, and the AI and ML features that matter in real systems such as embeddings, hybrid retrieval, RAG patterns, anomaly detection, and model inference. Each chapter walks you through ingesting data, setting sensible defaults, measuring performance, and adding the right dose of automation.

You will apply the same disciplined approach across Elastics three solution areas Search, Observability, and Security configuring them end to end and enhancing them with AI. The book closes with battle tested reference architectures and checklists you can adapt to your stack, along with guidance for cost, scaling, and operations. By the end, you will have the skills and confidence to design, implement, and run Elastic solutions that work at speed and scale.

What you will learnIdentify which Elastic components solve specific business problemsDeploy and secure Elastic clusters in cloud and self-hosted environmentsBuild robust data ingestion pipelines with transformation capabilitiesMaster ES|QL and other Elastic query languages for data analysisDesign Search, Observability, and Security solutions using KibanaImplement machine learning for anomaly detection and NLP tasksApply proven architecture patterns for production deploymentsWho this book is forThis book is for developers, system administrators, and security professionals who want to master the modern Elastic Search AI Platform. Whether you're new to Elastic, returning after time away, or upgrading from older versions, you'll learn to implement search, observability, and security solutions. Perfect for detection engineers, cybersecurity analysts, DevOps teams, and data engineers who need practical skills in data ingestion, analysis, and visualization. Basic familiarity with databases, system administration, and distributed systems concepts is helpful but not required.

Table of ContentsIntroduction to the Elastic StackInstalling components of the stackSecurity Authentication, Authorization & EncryptionKibana Data Exploration, Analytics & AdministrationStructuring and Organizing Your Elasticsearch IndicesCost, Performance, and Managing Data Over TimeManipulating and alerting on data with ElasticsearchRunning Machine Learning jobs on ElasticsearchUsing Logstash to extract, transform and load dataCollecting and

Kindle Edition

Expected publication February 9, 2027

About the author

Grant Patterson was born in Vancouver BC. He attended Simon Fraser University, and graduated in 1995 with a BA in Criminology. He retired from the Canada Border Services Agency in 2017, and lives in Delta with his wife and children. Grant has also lived and travelled extensively in Brazil, where his Will Bryant Thrillers are set.

He has been writing since 2012, and now has twenty-one published works. His bestselling works are A Life on the Line: My Unexpected Career with the Canada Border Services Agency, a memoir of his CBSA experiences, and Bomber's Moon, a novel set during the Bomber Command offensive against Nazi Germany.