Elastic Search use cases for us involve maintaining a huge amount of data per day, around millions of transactions for each record. We are maintaining all this data with Elastic, and Elastic is doing a fantastic job by doing the indexing. The algorithm is very good, enabling us to process the data very fast.

We are conducting searches with Elastic Search because the data volume is too high. With a couple of indexing configurations, we are able to achieve our goal.

A good feature of Elastic Search is that they have something called policies, which we can make hot and cold, all related to data retention, and that is what I appreciate the most.

From the UI point of view, we are using most probably Kibana, and I think they can do much better than that. That is something they can fine-tune a little bit, and then it will definitely be a good product.

Maintenance in terms of Elastic is that they can improve the UI and UX, and if they fine-tune it a little bit, then it will be much better.

I have used Elastic Search for the last two years in my career.

So far I haven't noticed any lagging, crashing, or downtime with Elastic Search.

The scalability of Elastic Search is good, and I am satisfied with that as of now, and the performance is good.

I don't think I have ever had to contact technical support.

I find the initial deployment of Elastic Search easy; it is quite straightforward.

Approximately, I am able to deploy Elastic Search within two to three hours for the first time.

To deploy, one or two people will be enough because you need Logstash to be configured to bring the data to Elastic Search for indexing.

We tried to implement big data pipelines and all, and we tried to use Spark as well for analytics and data cleaning, but I think Elastic is better in that field. I didn't find anything better than that.

My use case has evolved over time with Elastic Search. Initially, we started with it as a searching solution. Before Elastic Search, our primary source of truth was SQL databases, the traditional RDBMS. We thought about taking the data from the traditional RDBMS because they were not able to cater to the scale that we wanted to achieve, so we migrated the data from MySQL, keeping it as the primary source of truth, but for the searching mechanism and wildcard searches, we migrated to Elastic Search.

My experience with the relevancy of search results in Elastic Search includes both traditional keywords and full-text search. In the supply chain industry, with millions of orders and customers such as CMA CGM, Maersk, or Kuehne+Nagel, filtering out those orders was essential, using a shipment number, transportation order number, or an origin or destination number. In the gaming industry at FDJ United, full-text searches make more sense to understand gaming intent. For example, when a user searches for 'I really want to play action games', we break down that full-text query, use custom text analyzers, and derive the intent behind the user's query in combination with a vector database alongside Elastic Search.

My assessment of the effectiveness of hybrid search, combining vector and text searches, shows that Elastic Search is remarkable for text-based searches. I have explored other solutions, but none can beat Elastic Search in that area. When I combine hybrid searches with vector databases, they store the mathematical representation of the data. For instance, to find the top 10 closest proximity based on a query, the vector database uses cosine similarity on the available data and suggests the top 10 results while Elastic Search can keep the metadata, enabling quick access to the entire database based on derived intent.

I have utilized trusted GenAI experiences related to semantic search and text-based search in my current project using Elastic Search. My go-to solution for text-based searches will always be Elastic Search, but for semantic search, I am trying to build a solution that emphasizes system-level understanding agents. For example, if a new engineer queries the agent for a system explanation, it scans all the relevant data and provides a comprehensive analysis of the service, contextualizing inputs to reduce hallucination, controlled temperatures for the LLM model, and reducing nucleus sampling. As for knowledge preservation, I use a vector database to store significant outputs generated by the LLM, depending on user preferences regarding the gravity of the analyses performed.

The best features of Elastic Search that I appreciate include its capability for eventual consistent systems where you do not need hard consistency, and it scales very smoothly. For wildcard searches and regex patterns, it really scales massively. It offers ILM, indexation lifecycle management, which allows you to enable a search for a span of six months for the data fed into the system while moving the rest to a new cluster. The structure of the inverted index document facilitates its core features, and I find how Elastic Search understands, indexes, and creates mappings for your data to be remarkable.

While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that any amount of data can simply be dumped into Elastic Search. When creating an index, careful consideration of data massaging is essential. Elastic Search stores mappings for various data types, which must remain below a certain threshold to maintain functionality. Users need to throttle the number of fields for searching to avoid overloading the system and ensure that the design of the document is efficient for the Elastic Search index. Additionally, I suggest utilizing ILM periodically throughout the year to manage data shuffling between clusters, preventing hotspots in the distribution of requests across nodes.

I have been using Elastic Search for more than six years.

In terms of stability, I would rate it eight out of ten regarding downtime, bugs, and glitches.

For scalability, I assign it a ten out of ten.

I would rate Elastic Search's technical support as nine out of ten.

Before Elastic Search, our primary source of truth was SQL databases, the traditional RDBMS.

Estimating the return on investment from Elastic Search is nuanced; however, I can share that initially, search times from traditional RDBMS were around two to three seconds, and with Elastic Search, we reduced that to 50 milliseconds, indicating a significant improvement.

Assessing the complexity of deploying Elastic Search, I have a gray area because a separate DevOps team handles that aspect, but from my experience writing code and utilizing its features, I find it not complex at all.

Estimating the return on investment from Elastic Search is nuanced; however, I can share that initially, search times from traditional RDBMS were around two to three seconds, and with Elastic Search, we reduced that to 50 milliseconds, indicating a significant improvement.

On the subject of pricing, Elastic Search is very cost-efficient. You can host it on-premises, which would incur zero cost, or take it as a SaaS-based service, where the expenses remain minimal.

When comparing Elastic Search to other vendors and products, I have recently explored Algolia, which is also a fully managed service. Elastic Search offers a choice between hosting on-premises or as a fully managed service, which has been beneficial compared to other solutions.

In my company's relationship with the vendor, I have always worked in product-based companies using Elastic Search, often as part of solutions from companies such as Manhattan Associates and in the gaming sector. For B2B industries, they sold to large clients such as Maersk and CMA CGM while my current company, Agoda, operates in the B2C space.

Elastic Search does require some maintenance, especially when considering features such as ILM if you want to enjoy its capabilities. Maintenance tasks depend on the established data pipeline and may introduce some friction.

Currently, we are not using Elastic streams for log ingestion; previously, we utilized the ELK and EFK stacks with Logstash for log ingestion and Kibana for visualization. I also observe a trend where companies migrate to Grafana Loki instead of ELK.

Regarding integration aspects, Elastic Search has exposed REST APIs for all its services, making it easy to integrate with third-party models or endpoints regardless of the underlying infrastructure, as any modern development language can interact with these REST services.

I have not used the attack discovery feature.

My deployment of Elastic Search is on-premises.

At Agoda, we handle over 1.2 billion searches daily, facilitated by Elastic Search.

While I have been at my current company for four months, I am still getting to know my colleagues; however, I know there is a dedicated team focused on Elastic Search. This team exposes a service that acts as an intermediary for communication between Elastic Search and other services.

In my department, there are more than 100 people, whereas the overall organization consists of thousands, exceeding 10,000.

I would rate this review overall as a nine out of ten.

I have completed two different Elastic Search implementations, and in both cases, the goal was to speed up very slow Postgres databases. As a platform PM, I am typically responsible for user management and company management. These areas are quite heavy depending on how many users, customers, or companies exist. Before Elastic Search, when we relied solely on Postgres, there were significant delays to user list pages and company list pages. In the other company, there was a lot of data displayed for particular list pages for admins. We combined Postgres with Elastic Search to speed this up, and it certainly does speed it up. We have used it throughout my current job and previous job.

From the customer side, Elastic Search is super fast and very efficient, delivering results quickly. We recently tuned a series of compliance results in the CMS where we would specify that certain results should come up higher by adding keywords and other factors. However, the results were not as good as when we restarted and used Elastic Search out-of-the-box search results. We actually got better results that were more logical.

The most significant issue I find with Elastic Search is that it gets out of sync, and this has happened in both cases where I have implemented it. When Elastic Search gets out of sync, for instance, if I create a company or user, it gets created in Postgres and then sometimes there is a delay for it to appear in Elastic Search. This could be a 15-minute delay depending on how it was implemented. If other significant processes are running on the platform where you are touching a lot of records, such as a million records, that will take a hit on Elastic Search. We have seen differences of 800 records between Postgres and Elastic Search. Proactive tools that would find and adjust any mismatches would be beneficial.

Occasionally, Elastic Search has failed, and when that happens, search results do not come up at all. This has been a rare occurrence, and I am not certain Elastic Search is entirely to blame, as it could have been platform storage or other factors. For the most part, the most common problem is the out-of-sync issue.

I have used Elastic Search since 2019 at the last two companies where I have worked.

I would say Elastic Search is pretty scalable. We have had good results.

Earlier, in the 2019 and 2020 range, we were having a lot of trouble with syncing, and we tried to see if consulting was available. At the time, we could not find what we needed from the knowledge bases, and we could not really get support. There was not a technical support option at that time. That may have changed. Currently, I do not think we have gone to Elastic Search to ask for any significant help.

Google Appliance was a search engine that Google had for a while, and we used that and were pretty happy with it, but then they deprecated it and it is no longer available. After that, I do not remember what we used, something else.

Although I am not an engineer, it seemed easy to medium to set up. It was not complicated.

For the initial rollout, I would say it was maybe two or three people for the initial implementation, and then I have a team of 40 or 50 engineers with somebody always working on updates and other tasks.

We have not yet used anything in combination with Elastic Search, but that is on the roadmap.

I would say Elastic Search's relevancy is okay, and if I were to give it a score, I would give it a B. Elastic Search works best out of the box as much as possible. When you start to overtune or put in other factors that will increase the priority of specific results you want to come up, it gets really complicated and then you do not necessarily get the best results.

Elastic Search works best when used out of the box without excessive tuning. My overall review rating for Elastic Search is seven out of ten.

I use Elastic Search for fast search of products in our database. With Elastic Search, we use full-text search with keywords and different rules from the Elastic Search documentation. I do not have cases when a search request is four sentences long. I typically use three, four, or five words for searches.

I think the best feature of Elastic Search is the speed. It is very fast and comfortable to use in requests with transpositions rather than full requests. It has a smart engine inside.

In Elastic Search, the improvements I would like to see require many resources.

I have used Elastic Search for two or three years, though I do not remember exactly which it is.

Maintenance of Elastic Search is easy because we do not have problems. I would rate the stability of Elastic Search at an eight.

I would rate the scalability of Elastic Search at an eight.

I did not have a situation where I needed to ask something in technical support for Elastic Search.

I used a different solution before using Elastic Search. It was Sphinx.

I do not know if the deployment was easy or complex, and it is also not my responsibility.

I do not know how it was purchased as it is our DevOps responsibility. I know that it is in AWS, but I do not know the details of how it is deployed there.

I do not know about features such as Agentic AI, RAG, or Semantic Search in Elastic Search. I did not know that there are AI search features available.

I would recommend Elastic Search to other people who want to have fast search in their applications. It is comfortable, it is fast, and it is very interesting to work with it. I gave this product a rating of eight out of ten.

I work in a gaming company where we handle a lot of microservices, observability, monitoring, and metrics. We aggregate all our logs to Elastic Search for troubleshooting across different environments including production, staging, and dev. We use Elastic Search to give us insights and to conduct a lot of troubleshooting.

We decided to go with Elastic Search because of the ability to aggregate everything into one portal where we have access to our entire infrastructure and the correlation about observability and traces. I have used competitors, but we are not using them in the production environment; perhaps on lower environments, but for production, we use Elastic Search.

One thing I appreciate about Elastic Search is the ability to aggregate everything into one dashboard, so I can have monitoring, logs, and traces in one portal instead of having multiple different tools to do the same.

Normally, if you were to use Prometheus, you need to know the Prometheus query language, but with Elastic Search, it gives us the ability to use normal human language for queries. It is very intelligent when it comes to querying. Unless you want to search something in depth, I find it very user-friendly.

I think hybrid search, which combines vector and text searches, is very effective because a developer or platform engineer does not need to spend time learning how to do a query. They can log in and use the standard query language to query a specific log, for example.

The initial deployment of Elastic Search was very easy for our instance because we just needed to enable some annotations for it to start getting the logs. We only needed to do a very minimal deployment on our side. The advantage we had is we had already deployed templates, so we did not need to configure each and every microservice. Once Elastic Search was there and we were able to push the annotations to our deployment, everything came alive.

I think the biggest issue we had with Elastic Search was regarding integrations with our multi-factor authentication tool. We had a challenge with the types of protocols that it allows. Sometimes you find it only supports one or two, and maybe we have a third-party tool for our MFA, so we are limited in how we can do integrations and in terms of audit. Since we are in an environment where we need to be compliant and have all our audits done, it is very hard to audit access logs for Elastic Search. I do not know if that has changed; perhaps we are still on an older version, but that has been the major issue we have experienced.

When it comes to updates for Elastic Search, we might need to push updates, for example, when they have a security patch that we need to enhance or add into our deployments. We do this in the lower environments for staging and then promote it into production. There is not much ongoing maintenance that requires any sort of downtime.

Elastic Search gives you quotas, so you are able to monitor your quotas and know when you are about to fill them up and maybe expand or tighten on your logs. Internally, we try not to have alert fatigue, so we only do important logs and queries, and we rarely have any sort of lag.

Elastic Search is very flexible when it comes to scalability. Being on the enterprise license, it is not really a big issue for us because we can increase the number of quotas we need depending on the logs we want.

For Elastic Search, we have never contacted any support. I appreciate the way they do their documentation and blogs. As a technical professional, before I reach out to support, I have to do my own troubleshooting and research; unless it is something that I cannot resolve, that is when I will probably raise a ticket. In the recent past, we have not raised any specific ticket for Elastic Search.

Before we migrated to Elastic Search, we were using the open-source tools Grafana and Prometheus for logs, but we had to have another third-party tool to do tracing such as Jaeger, or have Sentry to do database logs.

The initial deployment of Elastic Search was very easy for our instance because we just needed to enable some annotations for it to start getting the logs. We only needed to do a very minimal deployment on our side. The advantage we had is we had already deployed templates, so we did not need to configure each and every microservice. Once Elastic Search was there and we were able to push the annotations to our deployment, everything came alive.

The deployment of Elastic Search was done by our DevOps team, because I am part of the DevOps team. Our technical lead was mostly involved in terms of authentications and API key setup. From my side, it was easy for me to enable the annotations on the deployment and commit into the repository and push the changes to it. It was a team effort at different levels.

I would give Elastic Search probably an eight because there is always room for improvement. In IT, everything keeps evolving, and AI is here, and probably tomorrow something else will come, so they will need to elevate their game. I give it a general rating of eight, which for me means it is working perfectly, but it can always get better; there is always something to improve. My overall review rating for Elastic Search is eight out of ten.

Our use case is mainly for monitoring purposes, as we are getting the logs from our Linux machines where the applications are installed. Then we are forwarding these logs from the Linux servers to Elastic Search.

For now, we are logging the logs into the dashboard, and whenever a user wants to search on the logs, we use the platform directly on Elastic Search. I don't think we use full keywords; we directly use the user interface in the Elastic Search dashboard. Mainly, I think that should be sufficient for our users.

We don't use elastic streams for log ingestion or for structuring raw logs without agents.

We use the attack discovery feature to create alerts.

The best feature of Elastic Search that I appreciate is its monitoring capability. Whatever logs you want to forward to Elastic Search are pretty clear, and you can even edit the logs if you want some logs to delete or some logs not to appear in the monitoring dashboard, so you can clear it from there. It's pretty easy to install, easy to get handy on Elastic Search, and also easy to use it in the project. I think that's the main advantage of Elastic Search.

From a security point of view, I find Elastic Search to be quite secure, as we have a separate cluster that is well secured, and not just anyone can enter it easily.

I've noticed that the logs we are getting from the Linux servers have become automated, and in the long term, I believe Elastic Search will give promising results. When compared to Prometheus and Grafana, Elastic Search plays a main role in injecting SQL-related logs as it can inject any type of logs. It can show us any type of logs, which will be very helpful for any company or organization.

We forward the logs to our internal system that has an internal alerting system maintained by ING. The person monitoring Elastic Search, for instance, an ops guy this week or next week, will take care of the alert and try to fix it, making it quite handy to use this feature.

I think the first area for improvement is pricing, as the cluster cost for Elastic Search is too high for me. When I compare it with Prometheus or Grafana, we get very cheap dashboards with them. Elastic clusters are very costly; I understand the capabilities it has, but the price should be reduced a little bit in the market.

I also think the indexing throughput should be reduced, as using the bulk API in Elastic Search takes a lot of time and should become very fast. Additionally, observability features like search latency, indexing rate, and maybe rejected requests should be added to make the platform more reliable and accessible for everyone.

I have been using Elastic Search for close to two years in my current project.

As far as I have been using it for two years, I did not find any glitches or bugs, so I would rate it an eight or nine.

When it comes to scalability, it is scalable, but the pricing also matters, so I would rate it six or seven.

I would rate their technical support a nine because they are pretty reachable every time.

The deployment was easy for us.

We wrote some Ansible scripts, and it took maybe two weeks, a couple of weeks.

I don't think the hybrid search that combines vectors and text searches will be in my use case.

Currently, we are not using any of the trusted GenAI experience features such as Agentic AI, RAG, or semantic search.

I recommend Elastic Search to other people because it's quite reliable when used in a project. Every project can incorporate Elastic Search because it has a lot of features. The only concern I have is pricing; other than that, the features are very good. Everyone will be able to use it easily, but you need to keep in mind that you have to train some resources because there are not many people experienced with Elastic Search. You should provide some training to them before deploying them onto the project. I would rate this review an eight overall.

I use Elastic Search, and from time to time I use it, but most of the time I am a system administrator. I deployed it more than using it. At the beginning, I was a system administrator, responsible for the deployment and maintenance of Elastic Search clusters. For a few years now, I have started to use it more because the end users are rookie users. They need a lot of help to be able to use Elastic Search effectively. I started to be a user approximately five years ago.

Today, at least, we provide a global, unique Elastic Search cluster for the whole company, and all teams store their logs inside, their traces, and their APM traces. Teams use Kibana to display information. We also use Prometheus exporters to collect metrics from the logs. We execute some query DSL over Elastic Search to collect metrics, which will be injected in a time series database like Prometheus. This is the main usage. We store metrics, logs, and APM traces.

The deployment of Elastic Search is excellent. I like Elastic Search very much for that. I say regularly to the team that Elastic is elastic. It is really difficult to break. This was not the case a few years ago when I worked with Elastic Search version one and version two. Starting with version six of Elastic Search, it started to be really strong. Today, in the past, the main issue was about the data and the volume.

At the moment they integrated lifecycle policy for indices, ILM, Index Life Cycle Management. When it was created, additionally to the data stream, it started to be really easy to have all the same index volume. It is really easy to administrate and to balance data between data centers and between data nodes, and to keep the same everywhere. It is very nice. It is my favorite feature of Elastic Search. It is so easy to manage. Also, maybe because we used it for a long time, we started to be comfortable with all the setup and the node type, and how we should manage our cluster to make it resilient. I think it is really easy to maintain comparatively to some other databases.

To be honest, there is only one downside of Elastic Search that makes sense because we use a basic license, which is a free license. We do not have some features available because of the free license. Except for that, I do not have any complaint. It works perfectly. It is pretty easy to administrate and to use. I do not have complaints, to be honest, except the fact that we do not have all features available such as the APM service map or alerting.

We are not able to use a provider like Sentry, Slack, or PagerDuty. We are forced at some point to generate metrics from the logs in order to use our alerting stack in Prometheus, which works. It is an open-source project which allows us to generate alerts to Slack, PagerDuty, and some third-party tools without any license. However, it is not doable with Elastic Search in the open-source version. The alerting part is the most complicated part to manage because of the license.

From time to time we have some JVM, Java Virtual Machine issues with Elastic Search. However, it is more linked to users' requests. From time to time, people ask Elastic Search to search inside one year of logs without a nice query and without any filters. This is clearly not doable and some nodes will crash. This makes sense. However, Elastic Search is really stable when we do not have this kind of request.

Elastic Search is the perfect tool for scalability. You just need to deploy new nodes. They will be able to join and reach the cluster really easily. I appreciate it for that as well because today at VP, we use Terraform to deploy our infrastructure. All Elastic Search nodes are managed through Terraform. If I need to extend my data node or my ingest node or whatever, I just need to deploy new nodes with the same setup, and the node will join my cluster, and it will scale horizontally really easily.

For logs management, I have not used any alternatives or something similar to Elastic Search. For APM as well, there was a plan in the past to try to migrate to Grafana, the Grafana open-source platform for APM traces using Tempo. Tempo is a Grafana Labs project. However, we decided to keep Elastic Search for that, so we do not have any other tool or similar tool to accomplish that.

Maybe just one, it is about error tracking. We can track errors with APM inside an application, and currently we use Sentry, which is not just an error tracking platform, but also about performance management. However, we use it only for error tracking. It is more useful for developers at the beginning of a new project. Most of the time, they prefer to be connected to Sentry more than APM in order to track errors. When the project will be in production, they will be more focused on the performance than the errors. At this moment they will start to use APM, Elastic Search APM more than Sentry. We do not provide any performance indicators. Sentry is also able to manage performance metrics, but we use it only for errors and everything related to performance has been disabled.

I think the pricing of Elastic Search is really, really expensive. The main point is that we do not get any license. I tried in the past, a few times, to contact the Elastic Search team to get a quote, and it was so complicated each time to get a quote because of the volume and the number of nodes. We are a big company at VP, so we have a lot of nodes, more than one hundred. For sure it was so expensive. They tried to tell me about the enterprise mode and about the new license way to manage cost based on CPU and memory usage. It was really expensive because at this moment, we do not use any cloud services. Our Elastic Search cluster is on-premises.

Everything is self-hosted at VP tech, at VP. We do not have any limit. People using AWS or GCP have limits because the volume of data is really expensive in cloud services and cloud platforms. Because we self-hosted everything around our services such as Elastic Search or Sentry, the idea is to let the user be able to store a lot of data and a lot of metrics. We try to train the team to have a good log level. We do not have such limitation in terms of volume. We have a really big cluster, and at the end, the price is so huge. I gave this review a rating of ten out of ten.

We utilize Elastic Search to bring a bunch of data sources together into a large search corpus, which is used to power our core research platform.

We don't generally do a lot of full-text search with Elastic Search. We do a lot of keyword-based searching and a lot of faceted search, and it works really well. We've also had to build custom relevance algorithms based on data that's being stored in the search index. This is more about the algorithm being less about text matching and more about feature matching and relevance on a number of different scales. It's generally worked out really well.

The best feature of Elastic Search is it does exactly what it says. It's really easy to get set up and running and have search running very quickly with basic, out-of-the-box features. It scales very well, and we can do a whole lot with the core feature set before having to move to more advanced concepts. Even then, it performs very well, whether we need to expand into vector databases or decide that the Elastic Search Query DSL doesn't solve our needs anymore and have to go with ESQL or something. It expands and scales really well.

The hosted solution means Elastic Search takes care of the maintenance, which is one of the reasons we chose it. There's been very little maintenance from a data perspective on our side. As we make changes to our database structure, we've had to mirror them into Elastic Search.

We haven't had the opportunity to use the hybrid search with Elastic Search yet. I think there's a place for it in our long-term solution, but we're not quite there yet.

We haven't yet used any AI features built into Elastic Search.

To do what we want to do with Elastic Search, the queries can get complex and require a fuller understanding of the DSL. Once we start to build that understanding, it's another muscle we have, so it's not a bad thing, but it just takes a while to get up and running with expertise for our engineers.

It's not hard to learn how to use more complex things in Elastic Search; it's just a challenge we're going to face.

In my career, I've been using Elastic Search for three or four companies, probably on and off for 10 years.

We've had various very small blips with Elastic Search, but it's never been an issue that was concerning. We have limited infrastructure, so we could go further in terms of our hosted deployment to ensure that some of those things didn't happen. We've simply accepted the level of risk we have.

Thus far, everything seems really good in terms of scalability for Elastic Search. We don't have the largest data set in the world; we have millions of records, single-digit millions, so two or three million records. I feel confident knowing that we could times that by 10 or 100, maybe, and it would still work. The cost would obviously scale, the number of nodes would scale, but Elastic Search would be able to handle that level of scale.

Before I was using Elastic Search and actually before Elastic Search even existed, I previously used Apache Solr and Lucene in my career. The release of Elastic Search way back when was a boon because it was out of the box and did what it said. We've also worked with Pinecone, Amazon's OpenSearch, and essentially Postgres trying to do vector search in Postgres. All of those tools have their place, but if we're doing straight search, Elastic Search is just really the right answer.

The initial deployment of Elastic Search was really straightforward because we used the hosted solution.

We had Elastic Search live and our first initial searches running in our staging environment within a week. We moved into production with our full data set within six weeks.

We had one engineer working on this implementation. That's why it took six weeks.

Elastic Search's pricing is affordable when using the hosted solution through Elastic Search. The pay-as-you-go monthly approach has been nice, and if we scale as a company grows, we'll probably switch to a prepaid model, which will be an even bigger benefit. Having the hosted solution and not having to pay for essentially a DevOps person on staff to manage makes it affordable. We haven't really looked into serverless, which has its own benefits. I think serverless still had some challenges early on, and I wanted to go with something I had previously worked with. The hosted solution pricing fits, but the pricing for serverless also looks really interesting. The self-managed solution is nice from a pricing perspective, but we need the right staff to support it, and we don't have that staff.

We don't use Elastic Search for log ingestion, though I think they have a feature for this.

We haven't worked with anything in terms of Elastic Search integration process for third-party models with interference endpoints.

I'm not using the Attack Discovery feature because we're not using Elastic Search for our observability approach.

We have no partnerships or anything with Elastic Search. I would rate this review as a 9.

Elastic Search is normally used for full-text search where users are fully depending on it for searching by name, address, and similar fields, and we need to gather the data with good latency, so we normally prefer to save it into Elastic Search.

Elastic Search helps for full-text search because we normally use it for keywords and other related terms. If there are keywords and searching requires numerical data and other elements, we prefer RDS over Elastic Search. However, if it is regarding complete full-text search in which we cannot do any kind of indexing and it is very difficult, we prefer Elastic Search.

Elastic Search's best feature is that it is very convenient to save, plus it is schema-less, and it has very good latency and also provides us with different kinds of mapping strategies which allow us to optimize many things according to the data structure. It is a kind of non-structured and structured mix.

The benefits of using Elastic Search are mostly for two to three purposes. For logging, it is very easy to insert the logs into Elastic Search and start searching it using Kibana, and it is very easy to make visualizations over there. The second purpose is that we normally use it for views. If we have searches from the front end with a specific structure, it is very difficult to go to a different table and create the query in the database, so what we do is sync our database with Elastic Search and create a view on Elastic Search which will give us the result in milliseconds. This is how we are currently utilizing it.

Elastic Search has an annoying limitation regarding page size. It has a specific limit for queries on Elastic Search, and the default is ten thousand, and we can increase it. However, after increasing, it can slow down. Pagination in Elastic Search is very slow. If I need to parse one million records saved into Elastic Search, it becomes a nightmare because I need to do the pagination, and it is very problematic in that regard. I need to do ten thousand records and then go to the other page, and when going to the other page, it currently takes much more time than RDS. For specific cases, if we need to do full-text search and searching for one specific word returns less than ten thousand records, it works very well. However, if we go for more than ten thousand, then it creates an issue for us.

It has been almost ten years since using Elastic Search.

Elastic Search receives a stability rating of nine point five; we rely on it.

In terms of scalability, for the managed service, it is very easy, but the scalability aspect is a bit tricky. Scaling up Elastic Search cluster requires a bit of time because of sharding and replications. It takes more time since it needs to copy the data. For example, if we are working on three nodes and adding a fourth node, the synchronization process will occur in the middle, and the higher the data volume, the more time it will take. Scalability is rated around five to six.

Elastic Search's technical support receives a rating of eight.

Previously, we were using the AWS managed cluster on the cloud, but now we have created our own. On the same cloud, we have deployed Elastic Search on our EC2 machines, so it is self-managed, not on-premises. On-premises would be if we give the solution to somebody else, then we would deploy Elastic Search on their specific cloud, but we only deployed it in our system.

I did not go into the deployment part of Elastic Search because it is a DevOps matter. I was in a senior role, so I sent the request and we received it. Normally, it does not take a lot of time if the person deploying is capable; it does not take more than two to three days.

We have about twelve specialists.

I cannot say much about the return on investment part because we normally work on a use case basis. If we find some kind of issue in our database which is currently taking time, then we need to shift to Elastic Search, and it will start giving us very good results. On the cost-saving side, rather than increasing our RDS from a less cluster to a big cluster, we can create a specific separate Elastic Search cluster, and it saves our money on our basic structure while giving us much more performance. I cannot tell you the exact part on how much was saved with the calculation, and I cannot provide the numbers, but it saves our time on the debugging side. Using it on the logs and creating visualization is very convenient for us to search the log and identify the issue as soon as possible. This saves our time, saves the customer's time, and decreases the time to respond and resolve.

Elastic Search's pricing totally depends on the server. Managed services from AWS are used, and we have worked on a self-managed Elastic Search cluster. On the AWS side, it is very expensive because they charge based on query basis or how much data is transferred in and out, making it very expensive. That is why we moved to the self-managed option. In self-managed, it is very easy to handle. We do not think any kind of proprietary Elastic Search solution is required.

Elastic Cloud Serverless is not being used. The GenAI experience with features like agentic AI, RAG, or semantic search is not currently being used. Kafka Streams is being used for log instigation.

Elastic Search has many pros, but the cons of it are that it is not structured, and we need to put all the things which are connected into a single index. Therefore, we cannot use it for our base structure database, but we always use it for supporting purposes.

While part of Careem, there were hundreds of thousands of customers using the solution, and now that in a startup, the clients are no more than one hundred.

Elastic Search requires maintenance. We need to keep it updated because Elastic Search normally launches new features and versions on both Kibana and Elastic Search sides. We need to keep updated ourselves, and also, we need to do maintenance on the storage side. Normally, we use Elastic Search for timelines, saving all the data from beginning to end, so normally the storage maintenance is an issue, and we have to increase the storage time to time, but it is not related to Elastic Search; it is actually related to our use case.

There is lots of support for Elastic Search in different tools like Logstash which we normally use for integration, and there are other tools as well, but it is very easy and not a big issue for that.

The Attack Discovery feature is not being used. Big businesses cannot survive without Elastic Search because it gives us very good visibility and handles our use cases very well. If we need something reliable and trustworthy as a solution, then Elastic Search is the way to go, as it is an integral part of big solutions. The overall review rating for Elastic Search is eight point five.