title: Logging from Java app to ELK without need for parsing logs
body: <p>I want to send logs from a Java app to ElasticSearch, and the conventional approach seems to be to set up Logstash on the server running the app, and have logstash parse the log files (with regex...!) and load them into ElasticSearch.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a reason it's done this way, rather than just setting up log4J (or logback) to log things in the desired format directly into a log collector that can then be shipped to ElasticSearch asynchronously? It seems crazy to me to have to fiddle with grok filters to deal with multiline stack traces (and burn CPU cycles on log parsing) when the app itself could just log it the desired format in the first place?</p>
  
  <p>On a tangentially related note, for apps running in a Docker container, is best practice to log directly to ElasticSearch, given the need to run only one process?</p>