Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review InfluxDB is very good at storing monitoring metrics (e.g. performance data). InfluxDB is not the right choice if you need to store other data types (like plain text, data relations etc.).
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Perfect handling telemetry data. Low latency, near real time. SQL-like language makes it easier to query. Read full review Cons Joining data requires duplicate de-normalized documents that make parent child relationships. It is hard and requires a lot of synchronizations Tracking errors in the data in the logs can be hard, and sometimes recurring errors blow up the error logs Schema changes require complete reindexing of an index Read full review GUI based administrator console Read full review Likelihood to Renew We're pretty heavily invested in ElasticSearch at this point, and there aren't any obvious negatives that would make us reconsider this decision.
Read full review InfluxDB is a near perfect product for time series database engines. The relatively small list of cons are heavily outweighed by it's ability to just work and be a very flexible and powerful database engine. The community and support provided by the corporation are the only areas I have little experience.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review We have worked with the InfluxDB support team a few times so far and it has been positive. Issues submitted are worked on promptly and we have good feedback.
Read full review Implementation Rating Do not mix data and master roles. Dedicate at least 3 nodes just for Master
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review To be honest, I didn't look at alternatives since InfluxDB performs very well if you can oversee the lack of security and HA features. But for all challenges, there is an easy solution which brings you forward (e.g. read load balancing can be achieved by using a common HTTPS load balancer).
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Provided us a time series DB. With the SQL-like language, it is very easy to learn. Empowered us to keep track of our events. Read full review ScreenShots