Elasticsearch is an enterprise search tool from Elastic in Mountain View, California.
$16
per month
ExtraHop Performance Platform
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
ExtraHop in Seattle, Washington offers an IT operations analytics platform via the ExtraHop Performance Platform, providing a dynamic, real-time view of all transactions in the IT environment, every team from NetOps to SecOps can spot and solve problems fast.
Elasticsearch is a really scalable solution that can fit a lot of needs, but the bigger and/or those needs become, the more understanding & infrastructure you will need for your instance to be running correctly. Elasticsearch is not problem-free - you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you are not following good practices and/or if are not managing the cluster correctly. Licensing is a big decision point here as Elasticsearch is a middleware component - be sure to read the licensing agreement of the version you want to try before you commit to it. Same goes for long-term support - be sure to keep yourself in the know for this aspect you may end up stuck with an unpatched version for years.
One very big use is the ability to resolve performance issues. One example used was with the performance of sql issues. ExtraHop [Performance Platform] gave us the packet tracing ability to see the database was being queried incorrectly. A programmer has written a query that would bring the database information local and one the queries instead of allowing the sql server itself to do the work and push out the information.
As I mentioned before, Elasticsearch's flexible data model is unparalleled. You can nest fields as deeply as you want, have as many fields as you want, but whatever you want in those fields (as long as it stays the same type), and all of it will be searchable and you don't need to even declare a schema beforehand!
Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is super strong financially and they have a great team of devs and product managers working on Elasticsearch. When I first started using ES 3 years ago, I was 90% impressed and knew it would be a good fit. 3 years later, I am 200% impressed and blown away by how far it has come and gotten even better. If there are features that are missing or you don't think it's fast enough right now, I bet it'll be suitable next year because the team behind it is so dang fast!
Elasticsearch is really, really stable. It takes a lot to bring down a cluster. It's self-balancing algorithms, leader-election system, self-healing properties are state of the art. We've never seen network failures or hard-drive corruption or CPU bugs bring down an ES cluster.
Some person like me who want to see Extrahop can integrate better with other network analysis tools like Wireshark or TCPdump. The desired functionality I've been looking for is to program a kind of specific criteria to trigger the probe starts to run Wireshark or TCPdump to save the trace of a specific problematic session. Sometimes I want to see the evidence in a packet trace layer rather than just have the warning or error only presented in the dashboard.
To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.
We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.
As far as we are concerned, Elasticsearch is the gold standard and we have barely evaluated any alternatives. You could consider it an alternative to a relational or NoSQL database, so in cases where those suffice, you don't need Elasticsearch. But if you want powerful text-based search capabilities across large data sets, Elasticsearch is the way to go.
We use ExtraHop specifically to monitor network traffic. It does many other things very well also, but it is the best network traffic analysis tool that we currently have in house. The fact that it is agentless also makes it more reliable and not dependent on agents running on devices throughout our enterprise.
We have had great luck with implementing Elasticsearch for our search and analytics use cases.
While the operational burden is not minimal, operating a cluster of servers, using a custom query language, writing Elasticsearch-specific bulk insert code, the performance and the relative operational ease of Elasticsearch are unparalleled.
We've easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Elasticsearch vs. RDBMS vs. other no-SQL solutions for our specific set of problems.
