Elastic is a very capable application monitoring solution that can scale easily as your organisation grows
Rating: 7 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
We utilise Elastic in our organisation to keep track of all the logs generated by the various internal services that we have running; we utilise it for monitoring in general but a frequent use case involves looking at logs for incident response purposes to figure out what is actually happening and try to understand any potential impact to the application so that we can take steps to avoid any downtime or negative consquences
Pros
- Licensing model is fair compared with other vendors that charge much more
- Ability to scale and ingest a lot of data without having to worry too much about performance issues that may crop up
- Searches return very fast
- GUI searching interface and filters are intuitive and suitable for new users
Cons
- The DSL advanced search syntax query language can be confusing to use as you have to maintain correct JSON formatting at all times
- More integrations with other common alerting/monitoring/ticketing platforms
- GUI hasn't had an update in a while, could benefit from an overhaul with more modern elements
- Default dashboards are suitable but there could be room for improvements e.g. more advanced custom dashboards
Likelihood to Recommend
Elastic is a great solution if you want to self-manage your data collection, don't want to pay excessive licensing costs to other vendors for features which are only rarely used and want a competent log aggregation system that returns results very quickly. Scalability is not an afterthought since you can easily grow your log searching and retention resources as the needs of the organisation grow. More and more vendors are building their proprietary solutions on top of Elastic so I believe the open source product will only keep on growing in adoption and getting better each year
Vetted Review
3 years of experience