What is our primary use case?
It is basically for the banking and non-banking sectors. We use it for the APM perspective and application performance monitoring, but not in a holistic way; it is just layer seven, layer five, and six that are there.
How has it helped my organization?
In analytics, people use it for search patterns. I've also used Elasticsearch for indexing, where we can have content and do these things. But from an analytics perspective, I have never used Elasticsearch. I have used it in one project
It's a good tool because if you compare it with MongoDB, MongoDB is better. It has a very good data warehouse and search pattern. Elasticsearch cannot be made into a data warehouse. You can use it for smaller-scale analytics, but if you are looking at anything over 30-40 TB, it's not a data lake or big data solution.
It's a normal database, and any Oracle database or enterprise DB like MSSQL or PostgreSQL can do these things. I've never used it for unstructured data. I have used MongoDB, but not for this.
What is most valuable?
All features are almost the same as other observability tools. The best part I like is that it becomes a MOM aka monitoring of monitors. It can capture data from all other sources. It's not a unique feature of Elasticsearch itself because other tools like Dynatrace do do the same thing. But from an ROI perspective and a user-friendly perspective, it is a good tool.
Even at level four to level seven of the OSI model, it does monitoring very well. There are a lot of AI-embedded tools or prediction tools, and numerous default reports are available, which get populated easily.
So, the quality features are there. There are about 60 to 70 odd reports available. When you deploy the tool and the logs come in, they can capture those logs and automate field mapping and other things. That's the feature—by default, a few reports are available.
The data indexing capability of Elasticsearch is very good. It does the indexing correctly. It's not over-indexing, so it's perfect. It's very good. But how it works depends on the customization of the application and the search pattern you want. The log can be easily viewed, and based on that, you can easily tag things.
What needs improvement?
Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve. Their license terms are based on the number of cores. If you increase the number of cores, it becomes very difficult to manage at a large scale. For example, if I have a $3 million project, I won't sell it because if we're dealing with a 10 TB or 50 TB system, there are a lot of systems and applications to monitor, and I have to make an MOM (Mean of Max) for everything. This is because of the cost impact.
Also, when you have horizontal scaling, it's like a multi-story building with only one elevator. You have to run around, and it's not efficient. Even the smallest task becomes difficult. That's the problem with horizontal scaling. They need to improve this because if they increase the cores and adjust the licensing accordingly, it would make more sense.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it for more than four to five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. It is a good product. It is a stable product.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Elasticsearch has horizontal scalability. The users can scale up to any level. The only problem is related to disaster recovery. After some time, it becomes very difficult to do the DC/DR mapping because observability is a critical tool for event alerts. It becomes difficult to manage real-time events if the primary data center goes down and the disaster recovery site needs to take over. This is an issue for large projects like those at tier-one organizations like Ford or big banks. For mid-level and lower-level tier-two or tier-three organizations, it is good.
Another thing to consider is that Elasticsearch has high resource utilization on both the vertical and horizontal levels. But it's a good product for tier-two organizations.
All my clients are enterprise businesses.
How are customer service and support?
I've never heard anything wrong from the delivery side, but it's an international company with a very good product. So, the support system should be good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I tried to sell Kibana twice, but in terms of deployment, we've used it in two or three places. However, I don't have hands-on experience with Kibana.
To be very honest, we faced some setbacks with Kibana, particularly with network-level monitoring. This issue occurred a few weeks ago when I tried to sell one of our products. We have used Kibana for APM purposes, as well as the Elasticsearch ELK stack.
From an application perspective, it’s one of the tools we use. I can share a lot of insights, but I haven't seen all their reports or dashboards. So, my experience is from a presales perspective rather than a deployment perspective.
If I compare it with other auxiliary tools like Dynatrace, SolarWinds, or Relay, Elasticsearch is very competitive and user-friendly.
One thing about Elasticsearch is the way they sell licenses for their database, which can be a bit hidden. Many people think Elasticsearch is entirely open-source, but there are charges involved. It's an MPP-based NoSQL database with some limitations on certain datasets.
How was the initial setup?
I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, with ten being easy. It is easy, not that difficult.
It can be deployed both on the cloud and on-premises. I've seen on-premises deployments. This is especially true in other parts of the world where governments don't want to use the private cloud and have their own private cloud. I have mostly worked with on-premises deployments.
The mapping can take three months on average. However, the deployment time depends on the project. If you have a hundred servers, it will take two or three weeks. With three or four thousand servers, it will take longer. It's the same with any tool, like Dynatrace or SolarWinds. We have to map services and events, set thresholds, and configure event triggering and notifications. There's a lot to consider, so it depends on the project scope, the number of servers, the data captured, and whether it's agent or agentless. It's difficult to calculate an average about how many days it will take.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive. It is not very costly, but it is not cheap either.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate it to others. Elasticsearch can be used for many things. It has a good indexing parameter and can be used for search patterns and more.
If it's for observability, I would give it a nine out of ten. The only issue I have is with APM (Application Performance Monitoring).
Elasticsearch as a product is different than Elasticsearch as a search engine. Elasticsearch is also different as an analytics tool. It depends on the analytical solution and how they want to fetch data from Elasticsearch as a database. As a search engine, it is one of the best. 90% of people use either Solar or Elasticsearch for web portals and other things. Nobody can challenge Elasticsearch in that area. So, out of ten, I would give it a ten.
But for analytics, I'd give it an eight. It depends on my database and in-memory tools. If I use QlikView or other tools, I'll just use Elasticsearch as a database. It's just like any other database they are using for in-memory analytics.
For observability, Elasticsearch, Logstash, and other things, it is a good component. It's good for tier-two enterprises. But when you define "enterprise," you must be specific. If you mean more than 2000 servers, then 90% of people won't consider it. There are other observability tools on the market. So, be specific in your query.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Reseller