ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) has become a popular log analytics solution for software-driven businesses, with thousands of organizations relying on it in 2021. The ELK stack provides a powerful solution for aggregating, managing, and querying log data in a central location from on-prem or cloud-based IT environments. Elasticsearch is the core component of the ELK stack, serving as a full-text search engine that underpins the stack. Logstash is used to aggregate log files from various sources and send them to Elasticsearch, while Kibana enables users to explore and analyze their log data, creating visualizations and dashboards that help analysts consume the data and extract insights. The ELK stack offers several benefits, including critical importance of logs for software-dependent organizations, open-source solution, and proven use cases with large technology companies like Netflix and LinkedIn. However, it also presents challenges such as managing large volumes of log data, dealing with high memory consumption, and increasing management complexity as deployments scale. An alternative to the ELK stack is ChaosSearch, which offers scalable log analytics on AWS S3 or GCS while reducing costs and improving analytical capabilities.