Elasticsearch is an enterprise search tool from Elastic in Mountain View, California.
$16
per month
OpenText Service Manager
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
OpenText™ Service Manager (formerly from Micro Focus) is scalable service desk software powered by machine learning, analytics, and automation. It provides an ITSM platform for standardizing service delivery and support across the enterprise.
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.
HP Service Manager (HPSM) is well suited for a big company and it does the job that it's intended to do but it's not perfect. It has a fairly large learning curve for searching Knowledge Management (KMs) and it takes time to learn how to be fast at creating/resolving tickets while on calls. I have been using HPSM for about 2 years now and we recently moved from the desk client to the web client and we are seeing a lot more issues than we did with the desk client. They keep coming out with updates for it so eventually most of our issues will hopefully be resolved. Overall the web experience is better as it looks more modern than what we used in the past.
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.
When you search Knowledge Articles, it is not like Google, and you need to learn how to search for what you need.
It takes a very long time to close tickets in HPSM. Here are the steps to close a ticket. 1. Add notes. 2. Add KM 3. Click Resolve 4.Click Save 5.Click Close 6.Click Okay to Message (ticket has recently been modified) 7. Click Close.
It's slow and sometimes crashes/freezes and you lose all the information you may have entered. I usually use notepad++ to gather all my notes and paste them into HPSM.
When searching previous tickets the preview pane does not allow for sorting by date to have the most recent at the very top every time you pull up previous tickets. Sometimes there are pages and pages of previous tickets and you have to click and scroll to get what you need.
I click on search KMs and it takes me to a blank page and I have to click the back button which then brings me to the search KM page.
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 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.
