Elastic Observability Reviews

As we have access to all the features offered by Elastic Observability, we utilize it for APM, to provide support and manage our infrastructure, and even leverage it for our CRM needs. 

What I find most appealing is the end-to-end platform that seamlessly integrates with other solutions. Its diverse set of features available on the cloud is of significant importance. In a hybrid cloud environment, Elastic Observability stands out by optimizing data transfer and application architecture compared to single-location alternatives. The key feature is the powerful search capability, which serves as the foundational element for our business.

There is room for improvement regarding its APM capabilities.

I have been using it for two years.

It is a highly reliable and stable solution.

I would rate its scalability capabilities nine out of ten.

The initial setup isn't quite straightforward. Improving the user interface setup experience is an area where Elastic could enhance its offering.

The deployment timeline varies depending on the project's complexity. It usually takes anywhere from three to six months, with the duration heavily contingent on the project's current state and scope.

I would recommend to observe the APM market, as it's interesting to note the emergence of a new competitor specifically targeting robust and high-performance applications. I would rate it nine out of ten.

The architecture and system's stability are simple. The storage management behind the massive platform and the service speed are good.

There could be on-site support services available in the Middle Eastern region. Also, more web features could be added to the product.

I have been using Elastic Observability as a distributor for one and a half years.

The product is stable. There are a few occasional issues with the platform's stability.

The product's scalability is good.

I worked with LogRhythm and Rapid7 before. Elastic provides better security, comparitiviely.

The initial setup process is simple. Working on the dashboard is easy. For small to medium businesses, it can take up to 15 days; for medium to large businesses, it can take 30 days.

Elastic Observability's pricing could be better for small-scale users. It is very competitive and good for large-scale users. The node for the end user might cost around 16k. We'll allow them to implement all the modules Elastic can provide, from EDR to integration with the NDR. All of these features will take full advantage of the node. If we need to enable any other feature, we need a professional service from the experts.

I rate Elastic Observability a nine out of ten.

We use Elastic Observability for system monitoring, server monitoring, and application monitoring. I'm working on a project wherein I use the solution for capacity planning.

I have built a mini business intelligence system based on Elastic Observability. We show all the real-time transactions, the transaction type, the transaction amount, and different kinds of metrics based on different transactions. We've built something that helps our different teams working with the same stack make everything visible using Kibana. This helps the compliance team to track some Visa card transactions, etc.

Elastic Observability’s price could be improved.

I have been using Elastic Observability since 2015.

Elastic Observability is a stable solution.

Currently, Elastic Observability is scalable because the client needs to see things working before agreeing to scale the solution.

I am the only guy involved with the solution's deployment.

Users have to pay for some features, like the alerts on different channels, because they are unavailable in different source versions.

The project requires monitoring and tracking everything, including some internal services with the SAP application. The project manager needs the capacity planning dashboard to help him reduce the cost on the cloud.

Overall, I rate Elastic Observability a nine out of ten.

We use the product to monitor various data pipelines.

Elastic Observability helps us detect more pipeline errors. We were able to resolve 30% of the issues. It also helped us improve our e-commerce sales by 15%.

The product’s most valuable feature is Kibana. We can view and connect different sources to the dashboard using it.

There could be more low-code features included in the product. They should improve the machine learning system. Additionally, more features should be related to LLM. 

We have been using Elastic Observability for more than five years.

I rate the product’s stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the product’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The technical support services need improvement.

Neutral

We have been partners with Grafana and Datadog. Thus, we use those solutions as well.

The initial setup process has medium complexity. We require an expert in Elastic products to deploy it. The on-premises setup is complicated. However, the cloud deployment is manageable as they have good documentation and playbooks.

Elastic Observability generates a return on investment in terms of data availability. It proves to be beneficial.

The product’s pricing needs improvement. It is expensive compared to Grafana.

I rate Elastic Observability a seven out of ten. I advise others to get assistance from a specialist in Elastic products to use all the features effectively.

We use the product to monitor our infrastructure. 

The solution is open-source and helps with back-end logging. It is also easy to handle. 

Elastic Observability is reactive rather than proactive. It should act as an ITSM tool and be able to create tickets and alerts on Jira. 

I have been working with the solution for six months. 

Elastic Observability is stable. 

The product is scalable, and we have around 75 users for it. 

The solution's documentation is perfectly fine. 

Elastic Observability's installation is complex. The deployment can be completed in one to two hours. You need three resources from DevOps and cloud operations to handle the deployment. 

We will buy a premium license after POC. 

I rate Elastic Observability a seven out of ten. 

Elastic APM is a kind of log aggregation tool and we're using it for that purpose. 

Elastic APM is very new so we haven't explored much on it, but it's quite interesting. It comes with a free offering included in the same license. So we are looking to explore more. It is still not as mature as other tools like Kibana, AppDynamics or New Relic products related to application performance monitoring. Elastic APM is still evolving, but it's quite interesting to be able to get all the similar options and features in Elastic APM.

In terms of what could be improved, Elastic APM's visualization is not that great compared to other tools. It's number of metrics is very low. Their JVM metrics are much less while running on CPU memory and on top of that you get a thread usage. They're not giving much on application performance metrics. In that respect, they have to improve a little bit. If you compare that with other tools, such as New Relic, which is also not giving many insights, it would be good to get internal calls or to see backend calls. We are not getting this kind of metric.

On the other hand, if you go to the trace view, it gives you a good backend calls view. That backend call view is also capturing everything, and we need some kind of control over it, which it does not have. For example, if I don't want some of the sequence selected, there should be controls for that. Moreover you need to do all these things manually. Nowadays, just imagine any product opted to do conservation manually, that would be really disastrous. We don't want to do that manually. For now this needs to be either by API or some kind of automated procedure. If you want to install the APM Agent, because it is manual we would need to tune it so that the APIs are available for the APM site. That's one drawback.

Additionally, the synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring services are not available here. Whereas in New Relic the user does get such services.

The third drawback I see is the control site. For now, only one role is defined for this APM. So if I want to restrict the user domain, for example, if in your organization you have two or three domains, domain A, domain B, domain C, but you want to give access to the specific domain or a specific application, I am not sure how to do that here.

Both the synthetic and process monitoring should be improved. For the JVM, Java Process Monitoring, and any process monitoring, they have to have more metrics and a breakdown of the TCP/IP, and the tools are giving me - they don't provide many metrics in size. You get everything, but you fail to visualize it. The New Relic only focuses on transactions, and Elastic APM also focuses on similar stuff, but I am still looking for other options like thread usage, backend calls, front end calls, or how many front end and backend calls. This kind of metric is definitely required.

We don't have much control. For example, some backend calls trigger thousands of prepared statements, update statements, or select statements, and we don't have any control. If I only want select statement, not update statements, this kind of control should be there and properly supplied. The property file is very big and it is still manual, so if you want control agent properties you need UI control or API control. Nowadays, the world is looking for the API site so they'll be able to develop more smartly. They are looking for these kinds of options to enrich their dashboard creation and management.

I'm new to Elastic APM, but I do have very good APM knowledge since I have been using APM almost 10 years and Elastic APM for just two years. I see that Elastic APM is still evolving.

Elastic APM's technical support is pretty good and we have a platinum license for log aggregation. They respond very quickly and they follow a very good strategy. They have one dedicated resource especially for us. I'm not sure if that is common for other customers, but they assigned a very dedicated resource. So for any technical issue a dedicated resource will respond. Then, if that resource is busy or not available someone will attend that call or respond with support. In that way, Elastic support fully understands your environment.

Otherwise, if you go with the global support model, they have to understand your environment first and keep asking the same question again and again. How many clusters do you have, what nodes do you have, these kind of questions. Then you need to supply that diagnosis. This is a challenge. If they have a dedicated or a support resource they usually don't ask these questions because they'll understand your environment very well because they have worked with you on previous cases. In that sense they provide very good support and answer the question immediately.

They provide immediate support. Usually they get back you the same or the next day. I think it's pretty good compared to any other support. It was even very good compared to New Relic.

There are two advantages to Elastic APM. It is open source and if somebody wants to try it out in their administration it's free to use. Also, it has full stack observability. For full stack observability, Elastic is the best tool compared with any other tool like New Relic or AppDynamics or Dynatrace. I'm not sure about Dynatrace, since I never worked with it, but I have worked with AppDynamics and New Relic. However, with their log aggregation side, there is still a lot to get implemented here.

I'd like bigger flexibility. That means we would get all the system logs, all the cloud logs, all the kinds of logs aggregated in a single location. On top of that, if they could have better metrics for handling data together it would give a greater advantage for observability. The Observability platform is pretty good because you already have logged data and information like that. If you just add APM data and visualize, you will get much needed information. How are you are going to visualize and how are you going to identify the issues?

For this purpose, Elastic is best. If you are really looking for an observability platform, Elastic provides both of these two options, APM plus log aggregation. But still they have to improve or they have to provide APIs for synthetic monitoring, internet monitoring, etc... If I think about synthetic monitoring, you can't compare New Relic with Elastic today. Elastic is much better.

These are the improvements they have to look at. They support similar functionalities of synthetic monitoring, so it's not a hundred percent APM friendly, but if you look at their observability platform, their full stack observability together with their log aggregation, Elastic APM is a greater advantage.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Elastic APM an eight out of 10.

We use it for monitoring the application performance and development.

We use AppDynamics and Elastic. The reason why we're using Elastic APM is because of the license count. It's very favorable compared to AppDynamics. It's inexpensive; it's economical.

The auto-discovery isn't nearly as good. That's a big portion of it. When you drop the agent onto the JVM and you're trying to figure things out, having to go through and manually do all that is cumbersome. 

We just started using it in the last month.

It is stable. We didn't find any issues.

You could scale it nicely. Currently, we have 400 or so app devs who are using it.

I have used their tech support, and they've been great. I'd give them a 10 out of 10.

We were using New Relic.

It's more complex. AppDynamics does a lot more auto-discovery in the setup.

You're not going to get around not having to do the work.

I would rate Elastic APM a seven out of 10.

The primary use case for our organization is handling login events. We also utilize it for some big data use cases.

Elastic APM help us anticipate and have a more accurate view in our IT exosystem. We deploy it specially for two mobile applications at the beginning. 

In addition to the fact that we are more proactive in the detection of incident before they occur, we can on one click see the request path from the customer to the backend. It is very useful and permits us to gain time. 

Before Elastic APM, we had to connect to different servers to check where is the issue. Now, we gain about 2h.

The solution is more of an optional variety platform. It's more than an APM platform. It goes further than that. I'd describe it as a more complete tool. 

The licenses are unlimited and based on the number of elastic search hosts contrary to the other solutions that are working in a model for a license for each instance monitored, for example, which is actually a very good thing. 

The price is very less expensive compared to the other solutions.

Our licensing model isn't a full one. We are in a less interesting model, so we do not have intelligence on it. We don't get system intelligence and machine learning models, however, I don't know if it is relevant to what we use the solution for. 

We don't have the platinum version. We are on the gold version. Our system intelligence and machine learning, and the other things regarding the competencies of everything, we have to build ourselves. It's not easy, as we are in West Africa and sometimes we do not have the relevant competencies. It takes time to get the skills we need to use the solution effectively.

The solution would be better if it was capable of more automation, especially in a monitoring capacity or for the response to abnormalities.

I've been using the solution for about one year now. It hasn't been too long.

The stability of the solution is decent. There aren't crashes. I don't recall experiencing bugs or glitches.

We currently have a gold subscription. In the platinum subscription, normally we have a Kubernetes version, so the scalability is built into it. With gold, we do not have the scalability capability. We do not have the top subscription license.

That's not to say the solution can't scale. You just need to have the proper subscription if that is your organization's goal.

We've had issues in the past and have had to reach out to technical support. They were helpful. We've been satisfied with the level of support we've been getting. It's been great.

The initial setup is simple, however, you need to have the resources necessary to set it up. We are working in an open source environment. It's simple, but it's a long process. You have to build the core competencies to be able to build the solution. This part is difficult, or, at least, can be difficult for some organizations.

We took approximately three months to run a POC (Proof Of Concept). Then, we started to work with it by covering one application stack. We have covered approximately three applications. This was done over the course of six months. 

However, how long it will take depends on the core competencies that you have and that you are working with. If you have the core competencies necessary, it would go pretty fast.

We are using the open source version, so there's been no need to build anything ourselves. We do not have a lot of casual issues, and, compared to other solutions like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and New Relic, it's much cheaper. The costs are very, very affordable.

Before choosing, we compare the solution to Dynatrace, New Relic and App Dynamics. We had a demo for each solution and compared the prices. We notice that these solutions had almost the same functionnalities. The difference was probably in the effort cost to deploy and implement the different use cases. We choose Elastic for the pricing and the fact that it's include the stack for log and event management.

We're a customer. We don't have a professional relationship with Elastic Path.

The solution is fantastic. I would rate it nine out of ten. It's practically perfect for our purposes and meets our needs. We still have to build it out. We're relatively new to using it.

To make it a perfect ten, for me, the ideal solution would be one that could automate a bit more for monitoring of our whole information system. If we could deploy something, and then discover automatically all our stacks or all of our infrastructure (like the one agent for Dynatrace), it would be perfect. 

Overall, I would recommend it. It's the most cost-effective. However, If you do not have an on-premise infrastructure, and you want to work on the cloud, or maybe you don't want to be involved in the management of the software as a service solution, you can look for software solutions like Dynatrace, AppDynamics, or New Relic.

New users will need to ask: do I have the core team with the core competencies? It may be the most cost-effective solution, however, it's really important to have the core competencies required, or you may run into issues.