Elastic Search Reviews

We use it for locating and retrieving documents, particularly in scenarios where the data lacks a predefined structure. These documents may encompass various types of information, such as logs or other records.

It is highly valuable because of its simplicity in maintenance, where most tasks are handled for you, and it offers a plethora of built-in features.

Currently, their focus seems to be on expanding integrations and introducing more external tools, somewhat diverging from enhancing the core product. While integrating with tools like agents for ingesting data from sources like firewalls is valuable, I believe prioritizing improvements to the core product would be more beneficial. For instance, the development of a multi-step query engine could significantly enhance user experience. The ability to execute queries, receive results, and then perform subsequent queries based on those results is a fundamental feature that, while achievable through code, seems to be lacking as a built-in capability. While they possess a robust infrastructure, the current upgrade process isn't seamless and can result in downtime. As a customer, this can be frustrating, especially when there are methods like replicating to a new instance, performing the upgrade, and then transitioning back, which could potentially minimize downtime. This is crucial in a cloud service where ensuring availability is paramount, considering the significant investment in such services.

I have been working with it for two years.

It offers good stability capabilities.

It is a scalable tool, but it's not impressive. The challenge arises when scaling out becomes prohibitively expensive. Instead of offering end-users the flexibility to specify the number of instances, there's a tendency to provide preconfigured packages. This approach may not be ideal, particularly for those seeking smaller scale-ups.

Their documentation is commendable as it provides a clear understanding of their offerings. Also, the accessibility to their support further enhances user-friendliness, making it a straightforward and user-friendly experience. While it may be slow, their competence in what they do is evident. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward.

Setting up the system initially is quite straightforward, but when it comes to upgrades, the process becomes more challenging. It was an in-house deployment. The primary focus is on designing the solution, considering factors like the importance of replication, cluster size, speed, and disk space. I appreciate their approach of guiding you through these considerations, making it easier to grasp the bigger picture. This initial design phase is a complex but crucial step. Once that's sorted, the subsequent steps are relatively straightforward—just a few clicks to establish the baseline. If you're working on a standard deployment, it's a hassle-free process.

The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps. It begins as quite affordable and maintains affordability for a while. However, there's a turning point where it transitions from being reasonably priced to becoming notably expensive.

We've explored a few alternatives, but I believe Elasticsearch, particularly with Elastic and Elastic Cloud, stands out as the current industry standard. Opting for a widely used platform is advantageous due to the larger community it attracts. A substantial user base means more people to consult, numerous information sources, and a wealth of case studies. While there are smaller, medium, and even large alternatives, having around eighty percent of the community share provides a significant pool of expertise and resources to tap into.

The main reason we opted for it is because the installation is straightforward, and maintenance is made easy as they handle that aspect for you. The extensive knowledge base offers substantial assistance, making it less reliant on individual expertise. I believe it's a solid product, especially for beginners. While it's not free, it's well-suited for more complex tasks. Keep in mind that for intricate functionalities, you might need to develop and create tools beyond what Elastic Cloud offers. If you're considering a cloud-based solution for schema-less documents, Elasticsearch is a solid choice. On the other hand, if you have the resources to handle on-premises installation, I would recommend it for companies with the capability to manage the deployment themselves. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

We save credentials, new account information, logs from Palantir Panorama, Firefox logs, traffic logs, GlobalProtect logs from our servers, and Active Directory new users. We're still improving this, but not very fast.

I appreciate that Elastic Enterprise Search is easy to use and that we have people on our team who are able to manage it effectively.

We are keeping an eye on other products like QRadar and Splunk in case they offer features that would benefit our company.

We currently use the free version of Elastic Search for some of our logs. However, if we were to use it more extensively, we would need to consider the pricing of the paid plans.

Another area of improvement is stability. 

 I have been using this solution for five years now.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We faced a few issues. 

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. 

We don't use the support because we use the free version.

We were able to handle the deployment ourselves. We have one administrator and three users for this solution. So, there are four people in total. 

I use the free version. We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. The free version is not very useful.

For me, the primary use case of Elasticsearch is log analysis, as it is a text-based search tool. To explain how it works, let's consider its role at the backend. Elasticsearch operates on keywords used to fetch data. This is in contrast to some databases, where operations might be based on a key order or a primary key, allowing for various maintenance and analysis tasks.

Many people use Elasticsearch to store their application logs in JSON format. These logs are indexed, facilitating efficient search and analysis. Additionally, Elasticsearch integrates well with tools like Grafana and Kibana, enabling users to create diverse dashboards for data visualization.

There's also the text-based search scenario. For instance, if a user wants to search for something using a specific keyword, Elasticsearch excels in this area by creating multiple indices. 

Elasticsearch is a versatile tool that can store and retrieve information effectively, making it suitable for various applications across different industries.

Elasticsearch is a quick search engine tool. A good use case is saving metadata of your systems for data cataloging. Various systems, like those opened in metadata and similar applications, use Elasticsearch to store their text data. However, the major use case for many is to store application logs and build different dashboards on top of it.

The use of Elasticsearch is very specific. It is not helpful for storing your OLTP data. Elasticsearch's specific use is when you need to provide text-based search functionality. That's when Elasticsearch becomes relevant. 

For instance, for log analysis or searching values, Elasticsearch performs very well. However, there are challenges with performance management and scalability, particularly how developers manage these aspects. 

For example, Kubernetes is a popular choice as it offers the needed features to run your application and allows performance optimization in response to increased system load, and managing itself. If you plan to deploy Elasticsearch with limited or predefined resources, it may not be the ideal setup. 

Therefore, it's better to create ultimate commerce capabilities for it. This is the challenge people are facing in the market and the solution for it. So, this answer combines two aspects: the challenge and its solution.

I have been using Elasticsearch for almost a year now. I'm comfortable working with it and understand its functionalities. 

In our organization, it's not so much about the number of people as it is about the number of products utilizing it. Currently, we use Elasticsearch in more than 12 products. 

It's become essential for any component that requires text-based functionality. Besides that, it's also used for logging to analyze application performance, peak times, etc. Elasticsearch is a basic component of the architecture for each of these products.

Most of our deployments are not exposed to the Internet or public networks; they're restricted to closed networks. We don’t frequently upgrade from previous versions unless a specific use case arises. 

In such cases, we usually turn to the developer community for support. 

Another scenario is when running the application in a careful mode, where the main requirement is to change the image name in the configuration. Then, we check for any changes or incompatibilities with previous versions. Upgrades can sometimes introduce issues if they’re not compatible with existing configuration files, but it's generally not too problematic to handle.

Deploying in Kubernetes is not complex. There are many resources in the market, like DevOps guys and guides, which make the process straightforward. The deployment can be done in a matter of minutes. You basically run a configuration file to set up your application, define replicas, and so on. It shouldn't take much time; even with an expert, it's a matter of a few hours. 

However, the key lies in following best practices and configuring your files properly. If you follow the best practices, you'll likely face fewer issues. But if not, problems are inevitable. 

It’s crucial to analyze these practices, considering factors like bandwidth, data volume, user interaction, and how it's read by different applications. These considerations help in managing resources and scalability, including scaling up and down your Elasticsearch container. These points are vital for running Elasticsearch efficiently, especially for text-based search applications.

You can deploy it as required. Elasticsearch is versatile; you can run it on Kubernetes, in the cloud, or on-premises. There is no limitation in terms of deployment options.

The cost varies based on factors like usage volume, network load, data storage size, and service utilization. If your usage isn't too extensive, the cost will be lower. 

However, if you're dealing with high volumes, you'll need to reconsider the cost-effectiveness. If there are no challenges or bottlenecks in buying a service from a cloud service provider, that might be a viable option. 

But if you're concerned about price or issues like exposing your data to the public cloud, then deploying on-premises and conducting stress testing becomes important. It’s a part of the learning and development process, not just a deployment for production. 

You need to pass through testing processes in the development environment and then move to staging and production. This involves various tests to understand user access patterns, data push, and performance assessment. Deploying on your own requires considering all these factors. On the other hand, if you use a cloud service, many of these concerns aren't your responsibility.

If you're interested in using Elasticsearch as a search tool and for cloud data integration, comparing it with alternatives like Amazon Cloud Search or Azure Search is valid. Many cloud service providers that offer text-search services are utilizing Elasticsearch. They've implemented best practices and resolved a myriad of issues experienced by companies using Azure, AWS, or GCP. 

These providers have integrated Elasticsearch into their cloud offerings effectively. Choosing their services might be preferable due to lower operational costs on your side. 

In case of any disaster or issue, their development and DevOps teams are available to support you. However, if you face limitations, like client requirements prohibiting data storage in public or private clouds, then deploying Elasticsearch on-premises would be your alternative.

I would definitely rate it an eight out of ten,  which is very good. The reason is the active community continuously working on it, and the support from contributors and the support team is notable. Because Elasticsearch is very specific in its use cases. 

It excels in text-based search and creating dashboards for application logs. It provides results and functionality that are hard to find in alternative tools. So, if you have a use case that fits, Elasticsearch is a great service without any direct alternatives.

We use the solution mainly for logs today. There are other teams that use it for other use cases. We just use it for logging and logging search and these kinds of things.

The search capabilities are the best that we could find. It's great for searching for any text with wild cards inside the logs. It's very good. We have a very good performance, even with billions of registries.

The solution is stable and reliable. 

We have an issue with the volume of data that we can handle. When we have a lot of data, like 30 days of logs, the product becomes slow, and we had to reduce it to seven days. Now, we have only seven days of logging.

Logging and tracing are different and we have a problem when it comes to tracing things. If we could have some feature related to tracing between microservices or between any sort of logging, that would be nice.

We've been using the solution for three or four years. We've used it since 2019.

This is a very stable solution. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

It's scalable in the sense of pods or quantity or numbers of requests, yet not so scalable when considering persistence. We can't handle too much long-term data.

We have at least 500 people using the solution right now.

As a bank, we have some constraints around using and adding new tools. It's very difficult to change stacks. Therefore, we have no plans to stop using the solution anytime soon. 

I've never directly worked with technical support. We have our own support comprised of our own employees. I do not deal with external support services.

We did no previously use a different solution. 

I can't speak to the initial setup. The infrastructure team handled the setup. I did not implement it directly.

It is my understanding we needed three or four engineers to handle the deployment and maintenance process. 

I do not have any details about the cost or licensing. That said, the cost is public, and likely, someone can search for the approximate costs online. 

We are a customer.

I'm not sure which version we're using. I'm from the development team. The people who are doing the configuring work would know the version.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. It is a good solution, yet not quite perfect.

Elastic Enterprise Search is the repository for time series and data from the onsite instrument that monitors variables in our mining infrastructure called tailing dams. We monitor the tailing dams' physical stability and take the information from the sales force and manual data introduced by the operators. The system captures the information in the Elastic Enterprise Searchtime series, and we make calculations and trigger events and alerts based on those calculations. We save them as well as the events and alert times.

Elastic Enterprise Search is a nonstructured database that can manage large amounts of nonstructured data. We also use a structured SQL database. I am unsure why our technical people selected Elastic Enterprise Search. The people that started the project selected open-source software and recommended the ETC component required in the system architecture. The Elastic Enterprise Search has been defined from the beginning of the project and fulfills the project's requirements. However, there is a lack of technical people to develop, implement and optimize equipment operation and web queries. This may be a problem with the provider, and they currently lack the resource to optimize the performance of the database.

Finding skilled people to work with Elastic Enterprise Search in the project team has been difficult. This may be because the development team has not considered it. It is important to improve the database performance because there is a large amount of data and the optimization of the queries and the system's performance are very important.

We also use three other databases, MinIO, PostgreSQL and PostgreSQL. We have a very skilled person on our team that knows how to use all these products. However, he's not responsible for optimization because it's the responsibility of the Indian provider that has to develop the application.

It is fairly stable.

It is a scalable solution. 70 people are working with this solution in the project, 35 on the development team and 20 backend people. We are working on the development, but it's part of the service that the Indian company has to provide. There are about 50 people on their development team who deal with all the development, infrastructure implementation, architecture definition and implementation of the software stack. We are the counterpart of that company.

Since it is open-source, we don't pay licensing fees. In the development and QA environment, we don't pay anything. We, however, have to pay for all the software, subscription, pre-protection and protection.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. Because it is open-source, there is no technical support provided by the vendor, so we are moving to enterprise subscriptions for each of these products. We are allowed free licenses and implement enterprise or commercial licenses and the production of protections.

An original criterion selects the software stack because they have to be good tools, but they all have to be open-source. Nobody considers it because the original team that started the project worked in an investigation organization and was closer to open-source software.

They are not clear regarding the support of their solution when they go into production. That's why we are updating the licenses to interpret license subscriptions and assume their support for each software component.

Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful. However, it is not functioning correctly, as the real-time search consumes significant system resources.

The search feature is one of the valuable features of Elasticsearch.

There are areas for improvement in Elasticsearch.

The real-time search functionality is not operational due to its impact on system resources. There are some stability issues.

My overall experience with support was positive.

Neutral

The initial setup is complex.

I do not have specific details about the implementation team. The process might require certain expertise.

The pricing is not cheap and is expensive.

I compared the differences between Elastic and other SIEM solutions.

I am more like an implementer than a customer.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

The primary use case for Elasticsearch is to serve as a non-SQL database platform to replace traditional SQL processes. It is used in situations where unstructured data needs to be studied and searched.

Elasticsearch has been helpful due to its ability to handle unstructured data effectively compared to SQL. It provides a fast and interesting search capability which is advantageous for our needs.

The most valuable feature of Elasticsearch is its convenience in handling unstructured data, making it easy to use.

Elasticsearch could be improved in terms of scalability. If the database becomes too large, its efficiency is not as good as SQL. Additionally, the initial setup could be a little easier.

We have been using Elasticsearch for about two to three years.

We have faced shutdown issues, but these are mostly related to problems with our own machines and not due to Elasticsearch itself.

Elasticsearch is not scalable when dealing with very large databases. The efficiency decreases for huge databases because it deals with unstructured data, which presents an inherent problem.

The initial setup is of medium difficulty since it requires some understanding of the disk and related concepts.

Elasticsearch can be expensive. It requires some support and unlocking of features.

I recommend Elasticsearch for anyone looking to build a simple database, as it should be a top choice.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

Elastic Search is added advantage for us because we normally use it for our uptime monitoring and our log analysis. When we merge it with Splunk, it helps us correlate and do security monitoring. 

Elastic Enterprise Search comes embedded within a solution that we have developed for our clients. It's a payment solution. We've recently shipped it with Elastic Enterprise Search embedded. All the logs and all the internal communications get captured by Elastic Enterprise Search. It makes it easy for the IT teams who are doing uptime monitoring and troubleshooting to have a look at it. We have the security teams develop their own monitoring metrics and logs, if they wish, based on their deployment. 

The beauty of Elastic Enterprise Search is if they also have their own third-party tools, there's the ability to integrate and read off Elastic Enterprise Search and have any third-party tool process the logs as well. It is highly extensible.

The most valuable features of Elastic Enterprise Search are it's cloud-ready and we do a lot of infrastructure as code. By using ELK, we're able to deploy the solution as part of our ISC deployment. 

The extensibility and configurability of the solution are great. Having the ability to mine for anything is useful. It's extensible and useful in terms of digesting any type of information. Since we do a lot of consulting, it means we are able to apply it to diverse environments without having to suffer the overhead of integration.

There is another solution I'm testing which has a 500 record limit when you do a search on Elastic Enterprise Search. That's the only area in which I'm not sure whether it's a limitation on our end in terms of knowledge or a technical limitation from Elastic Enterprise Search. There is another solution we are looking at that rides on Elastic Enterprise Search. And the limit is for any sort of records that you're doing or data analysis you're trying to do, you can only extract 500 records at a time. I know the open-source nature has a lot of limitations, Otherwise, Elastic Enterprise Search is a fantastic solution and I'd recommend it to anyone.

I have been using Elastic Enterprise Search for approximately four years.

I have no complaints in terms of stability. However, you have to make sure you give Elastic Enterprise Search the minimum resources it requires. We have not seen any major issues that we would send back to the vendor or the solution maker. If there was an issue it most likely would be from the environment, depending on how it was deployed and how it was configured.

Elastic Enterprise Search is scalable. In our environment, we deploy it in a containerized environment. For us, we've experienced the scalability of the solution because as we grow and expand, we spin up more containers that are interconnected. I don't see any issues with Elastic Enterprise Search from a scalability perspective. 

There's a lot of material available online. We tend to look online before we reach out for technical support. We have not needed to contact the support and this is a testament to how much information is available online. 

The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model. 

Elastic Enterprise Search is a very good solution and they should keep doing good work.

I'm a very satisfied customer because almost everything I need comes out of the book. You already have machine learning, alerts, the ability to search, APIs, inbuilt security, and integration to third-party authentication.

I rate Elastic Enterprise Search a ten out of ten.