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.
It has been brilliant for us in terms of understanding the behaviour affecting our endpoints and assets. We have full visibility of our alerts, which menas we can act on them immediately. We use a single pain of glass with dashboards that can be easily drilled down into to get further information. It has laso helped us eo create bespoke reports for senios Managmeent, while at the same time supports other teams like Network Mnagement and Operations.
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.
Rapid7 InsightIDR does a very good job at keeping virus definitions up to date so that our threat intelligence is very up to date when knowing what to protect against.
It helps us by scanning all of our infrastructure components and highlights where improvements need to be made in security so we can be proactive with our security initiatives.
It has automated response mechanisms to triage and resolve any potentials risks allowing us to save time in the long run.
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.
The biggest advantage it has the lightweight agent and smooth and less traffic chaos in network during log collection. Cloud Security always require extra efforts but InsightIDR reduce that burden as it has highly anticipated agents to which knows what they need to do when they captured malicious traffic.log collection and threat intelligence is major part in and xdr and here it stand out along others in the market, I started my career as qualys administration but I like InsightIDR much now.
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.
Rapid7 InsightIDR has allowed us to be proactive in securing our systems as the vulnerability scans give us a lens at what we need to fortify when it comes to security.
In recent incidents its allowed us to save time and money as it mostly detects issues accurately and we are able to bring systems back quickly without too much downtime for the business.
With recent updates, we are confident that Rapid7 InsightIDR is a good solution for the long run as they are always making adjustments to their platform and improving it with every release.
