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Elasticsearch

Score8.8 out of 10

208 Reviews and Ratings

What is Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch is an enterprise search tool from Elastic in Mountain View, California.

Categories & Use Cases

Elasticsearch is your way to go!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Elasticsearch is an important service that we use frequently in the organization. We use Elasticsearch as a logging service for our system logs, Once we have the logs in Elasticsearch, we connect to Kibana and start building dashboards and charts that help us track our system stability and availability in terms of System metrics. On the other hand, we use it to track new bugs and errors. The other usage for Elasticsearch in our system is as a search engine. Elasticsearch is a very fast and amazing search engine, where we store some fields and call Elasticsearch APIs to fetch these fields when needed.

Pros

  • Log management
  • Search Engine
  • Autocomplete service
  • Storing Data
  • Caching layer in some cases
  • ML and data analysis

Cons

  • Elasticsearch is kind of hard to maintain as a cluster on k8s when self-managed.
  • Good to support AI that will help buidling complex queries
  • Documentation for Java library of Elasticsearch and Elasticsearch client is not that great compared to the APIs documentation

Return on Investment

  • We're able to detect system incidents at early stage
  • We can achieve 99.98% availability for searching service
  • Data retrieval speed is less than 300 ms on avg

Alternatives Considered

Sumo Logic, Splunk Log Observer and Prometheus

Other Software Used

Splunk On-Call, ManageEngine Site24x7, MongoDB, Redis™*, Snyk, Cloudflare, Domo, Slack, Fullstory, NetSuite ERP, LaunchDarkly, Ghost Inspector

Elasticsearch Overall Review

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Elasticsearch to analyze and visualize logs from various Engineering workflows. We have clusters defined for providing Application Performance Monitoring for a variety of Engineering applications, utilizing Beats and other processes to populate the data required for monitoring and analysis. We also capture metrics (for both servers and applications).

Pros

  • Log and data capture, via Beats
  • Visualization of data
  • Application monitoring

Cons

  • Some of the cluster management functions could be more intuitive.
  • It would be nice if it could be used for large data sets (streaming data)
  • Troubleshooting could be easier.

Return on Investment

  • Elasticsearch provides a convenient way to analyze data from various data sources.
  • Visualizations from data analysis provide easy guidance to management.
  • Elasticsearch reduces overall IT/Administrative costs

Alternatives Considered

Apache Druid, Splunk Enterprise and Grafana

Other Software Used

Apache Druid, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Grafana

Great search, aggregation and visualization products.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ECE platform and Elasticsearch for the delivery data to track delivery. And also use kibana for visualization of business analysis and KPI. We also ingest the log from different API and investigate when there is a trouble. We also use transform and machine learning feature to detect anomalies.

Pros

  • Full text search
  • aggregation
  • anomaly detection
  • dashboard
  • canvas

Cons

  • SIEM
  • Ingest API
  • The performance for a large cluster
  • business analysis

Return on Investment

  • The license is quite expensive
  • The consultation and operation cost is also a high cost
  • The performance during the peak period is not stable enough but there isn't good temporary solution

Alternatives Considered

OpenSearch and Splunk Enterprise

Other Software Used

AWS CloudTrail, Apache Kafka, AWS Lambda

Elasticsearch is a tricky, but great data platform

Pros

  • Data persistence & retriveval
  • Data indexing
  • Metrics & reporting over data thanks to its query language & Kibana visualization
  • Flexibility of data sources - a lot of existing "beats" + ability to push custom data easily
  • Very scalable - although a minimum of 3 nodes is advised, even a 1-node installation can work great for some use cases.

Cons

  • Licensing - this is big issue with a lot of companies that try to embed Elasticsearch as a part of their products and not have to expose that explicitly or deal with licensing complications.
  • Security - this is not a feature enabled by default so installations can go and be unsecure & thus exploited without anyone noticing.
  • Having security turned off can be beneficial for some performance optimizations though.
  • Cluster restructuring/upgrading - if you need to do a rolling cluster upgrade, node roles and data replication is handled in a complicated & tricky way so you need to have knowledge & experience to survive such an operation with your data & cluster to be operational after it.

Most Important Features

  • Data persistence, indexing and querying at high speed
  • Scalability
  • Building reporting over data thanks to Kibana

Return on Investment

  • Greatly reduced data-in-transit and at-rest overheads
  • Provided us with a truly scalable solution for our data
  • Kibana offers a reporting platform based on our custom queries. Extremely useful for reports from automated test executions.

Alternatives Considered

Apache Solr and MongoDB

Other Software Used

Microsoft Teams, Docker, Sonatype Nexus Platform

Search begets Search - Navigating your data progressively

Pros

  • Indexing text data
  • Aggregations allow users to progressively add search criteria to refine their searches
  • Find trends in our data with Aggregations
  • Integrate text Search our taxonomy Search

Cons

  • Joining data requires duplicate de-normalized documents that make parent child relationships. It is hard and requires a lot of synchronizations
  • Tracking errors in the data in the logs can be hard, and sometimes recurring errors blow up the error logs
  • Schema changes require complete reindexing of an index

Most Important Features

  • Text Search (Natural Language Processing)
  • Integration with Couchbase
  • Integration with multiple platforms including dot net and nodejs
  • Aggregations and search done together

Return on Investment

  • Most of our investment is in programming hours which is expensive
  • Easy to set up nodes
  • Free version has a lot of the great basic features

Alternatives Considered

Apache Solr, Splunk Enterprise and Couchbase

Other Software Used

Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Couchbase, MongoDB, Docker, ASP.NET, Visual Studio IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Windows Server, Global Relay Archive