//I work with Splunk currently and have been interested in looking at the capabilities of the ELK stack. have any recommended places to start?
Honestly, getting all three: Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, all wired up is really straight forward. It's even easier if you use AWS's built in elasticsearch service.
I used ELK to analyze my nginx logs, and it worked really well, and now that logstash-forwarder is replaced by Beats, its even more reliable.