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Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch

Overview

What is Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch is an enterprise search tool from Elastic in Mountain View, California.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Elasticsearch has become an essential tool for users across various industries and domains. Its distributed architecture enables efficient …
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Pricing

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Standard

$16.00

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$19.00

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$22.00

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Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

How to create data views and gain insights on Elastic

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Setting Up a Search Box to Your Website or Application with Elasticsearch

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ChatGPT and Elasticsearch: OpenAI meets private data setup walkthrough

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Product Details

What is Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of addressing a growing number of use cases. As the heart of the Elastic Stack, it centrally stores data for fast search, fine‑tuned relevancy, and analytics that scale.

Elasticsearch now features generative AI search capabilities. Elasticsearch Relevance Engineâ„¢ (ESRE) powers generative AI solutions for private data sets with a vector database and machine learning models for semantic search that bring increased relevance to more search application developers.

ESRE combines AI with Elastic’s text search to give developers a full suite of sophisticated retrieval algorithms and the ability to integrate with large language models (LLMs). It is accessed through a single, unified API.

The Elasticsearch Relevance Engine’s configurable capabilities can be used to help improve relevance by:

  • Applying advanced relevance ranking features including BM25f, a critical component of hybrid search
  • Creating, storing, and searching dense embeddings using Elastic’s vector database
  • Processing text using a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks and models
  • Letting developers manage and use their own transformer models in Elastic for business specific context
  • Integrating with third-party transformer models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 and 4 via API to retrieve intuitive summarization of content based on the customer’s data stores consolidated within Elasticsearch deployments
  • Enabling ML-powered search without training or maintaining a model using Elastic’s out-of-the-box Learned Sparse Encoder model to deliver highly relevant, semantic search across a variety of domains
  • Combining sparse and dense retrieval using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF), a hybrid ranking method that gives developers control to optimize their AI search engine to their unique mix of natural language and keyword query types
  • Integrating with third-party tooling such as LangChain to help build sophisticated data pipelines and generative AI applications

Elasticsearch Video

What is Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Elasticsearch is an enterprise search tool from Elastic in Mountain View, California.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 7.8.

The most common users of Elasticsearch are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(205)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Elasticsearch has become an essential tool for users across various industries and domains. Its distributed architecture enables efficient searching of large datasets, even with partial text matches and across multiple fields. This capability makes it invaluable for tasks such as logging and analysis in cloud environments, where managing hundreds or thousands of servers is a necessity. Elasticsearch's fast and powerful search capabilities find application in B2B and B2C eCommerce websites, allowing users to search by various criteria like title, artist, genre, price range, and availability date. It serves as a reliable solution for tracking logs, incidents, analytics, and code quality. Additionally, Elasticsearch's ability to index and search large sets of data facilitates the creation of reporting dashboards. The product's built-in data replication features ensure data availability and easy retrieval while its scalability supports operational needs. It also enables tokenized free text search in audio transcripts as well as indexing and analyzing HTTP Request Response messages to detect security threats. With its wide range of use cases spanning from web search engines to scientific journals and complex data indexing, Elasticsearch proves to be an indispensable tool for organizations seeking efficient data storage solutions.

Highly Scalable Solution: Elasticsearch has been consistently praised by users for its highly scalable nature. It is able to handle storing and retrieving large numbers of documents, offering redundancy and distributed storage across multiple hosts with minimal configuration required.

Extensive Search Capabilities: Users highly praise Elasticsearch for its extensive search capabilities, especially in terms of full-text search. They find it easy to search and filter through millions of documents efficiently, even on large datasets, thanks to its fast search speeds.

Valuable Aggregations and Facets: Elasticsearch's support for aggregations and facets is highlighted as a valuable feature by users. They appreciate the ability to progressively add search criteria to refine their searches and uncover trends in their data.

Configuration Process: Users have encountered difficulties when implementing custom functions and have found the configuration process to be lacking. Some reviewers have mentioned challenges in integrating different elements of the program, incomplete documentation, and misleading forums.

Query Editor Limitations: Users have experienced issues with the query editor and noted that certain queries are not supported in the IntelliSense feature. Several users expressed frustration with inadequate documentation, hard-to-debug problems, and the complexities involved in tuning for ingress performance.

Learning Curve: Users have found the learning curve to be challenging, particularly for those with a background in SQL. Many reviewers mentioned a steep learning curve, extensive documentation requirements, and complexities related to mapping and data type conversion.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 46)
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John Anderson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Elasticsearch to analyze and visualize logs from various Engineering workflows. We have clusters defined for providing Application Performance Monitoring for a variety of Engineering applications, utilizing Beats and other processes to populate the data required for monitoring and analysis. We also capture metrics (for both servers and applications).
  • Log and data capture, via Beats
  • Visualization of data
  • Application monitoring
  • Some of the cluster management functions could be more intuitive.
  • It would be nice if it could be used for large data sets (streaming data)
  • Troubleshooting could be easier.
As stated before, it does a good job of providing analysis and visualization on data coming into the system, but troubleshooting could be better (when issues arise). Performance, scalability, and overall speed are good, but the trade-off is it can be resource-intensive. Overall a good tool, it just takes a bit to learn (it's not always as "intuitive" as it should be).
Borislav Traykov | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Elasticsearch (Elastic for short, but that includes Kibana & LogStash so the full ELK kit) for 3 major purposes:
  • product data persistence - as JSON objects.
  • as log storage - different components produce log files in different formats + logs from other systems like the OSes and even some networking appliances.
  • as test automation results storage & reporting platform - this is an implementation we glimpsed from an old Trivago blog post.
Different forms of Elastic are being used across the company - the vanilla one, OpenDistro and OpenSearch. Licensing limbo + long-term support make people here jump from one implementation to another.
  • Data persistence & retriveval
  • Data indexing
  • Metrics & reporting over data thanks to its query language & Kibana visualization
  • Flexibility of data sources - a lot of existing "beats" + ability to push custom data easily
  • Very scalable - although a minimum of 3 nodes is advised, even a 1-node installation can work great for some use cases.
  • Licensing - this is big issue with a lot of companies that try to embed Elasticsearch as a part of their products and not have to expose that explicitly or deal with licensing complications.
  • Security - this is not a feature enabled by default so installations can go and be unsecure & thus exploited without anyone noticing.
  • Having security turned off can be beneficial for some performance optimizations though.
  • Cluster restructuring/upgrading - if you need to do a rolling cluster upgrade, node roles and data replication is handled in a complicated & tricky way so you need to have knowledge & experience to survive such an operation with your data & cluster to be operational after it.
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.
Oscar Narváez Del Rio | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Elasticsearch enables an operational capacity to quickly adopt this technology and boost observability on the different platform's components (infrastructure, integration, application, and services). Elasticsearch distributed architecture to index and search data make it a robust platform to scale on the go and support operational needs.
  • Observability features
  • Machine learning for anomaly detection
  • Index and search high volume of data
  • Basic alerting features
Elasticseach platform allows implementing a robust operational stuck for unified observability handling a huge volume of data with high performance and capacity to scale fast. Logstash, Beats, and APM products provide a structured framework to collect events and data being easy to deploy and configure.
Keith Lubell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Elasticsearch to Index and make available for Search and Navigation our proprietary data on the M&A landscape. It drives dashboards and alerts to allow users to monitor trends and the latest events that occur in our dataset. It aligns our research group with our bankers. We marry it to Couchbase and MS SQL-Server.
  • Indexing text data
  • Aggregations allow users to progressively add search criteria to refine their searches
  • Find trends in our data with Aggregations
  • Integrate text Search our taxonomy Search
  • 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
Elasticsearch is really well suited for searching text (Natural Language Processing) and you can fine tune the searches and scoring very well. I like the ability to find Significant Terms in the Index, where you can find aggregations that are really relevant to a specific search. It also allows for queries to lead to new queries via aggregations which is great for navigating your data. It is less suited to doing more complex aggregations where slices of data are required to be processing using guassian normalizations. And doing searches which join different documents is very very hard, and requires serious thought on how to denormalize data.
Andrew Meyer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using this in conjunction with other applications such as Atlassian stack. So this is being used throughout the whole organization but is an extension to another application. This allows us to search for words/topics very quickly in projects and commits. We currently use it in a single server instance.
  • Database
  • Scalability
  • Deployment
  • Backup
  • Rest API browser
  • Remote management using utilities
Elasticsearch is used very well in the log management space. In conjunction with Logstash, Kibana, and Graylog Elasticsearch makes leveraging these products wonderful. The ease of deploying it. Securing it very quickly. Fast and scalable searching options. It can also be a distributed data warehouse for immutable documents. However, it is not a fully functional database system.
April 01, 2021

Elasticsearch Review

Josh Kramer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used in our custom software application for advanced searching and filtering capabilities for our users.
  • It allows extremely fast search and filtering on large datasets
  • It has a very powerful aggregation engine that can allow for tons of customizable analytics and reports.
  • The documentation could be a bit more detailed and have more examples, especially for advanced functionality.
  • The ability to update/change existing live field mappings would be nice.
  • The ingest pipeline structure is a bit more complicated and confusing than previous implementations for using things like attachment plug-ins.
It is well suited for anything involving large data - searching, filtering, aggregations, analytics, reporting, etc.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In my organization, Elasticsearch is used as a fast and simple solution for providing search capability to text-based data and to easily perform analytics for our dashboard. Being a JSON-based response system, our APIs become simple and support multiple behaviors by translating to Elasticsearch queries. Not only does Elasticsearch act as our analytics platform, but also it serves as secondary database storage.
  • Text-based searches on data
  • Daily, weekly, monthly analytics on data
  • Super easy scripting with painless scripting language
  • Relational data query
  • Sync data from SQL on table change (with hash maybe)
  • Provide better tutorials for beginners
Elasticsearch is best suited for search, analytics, aggregation, and consumption from single tabular structured data. It works best if you sync your data at regular intervals either with Logstash or any other custom sync process.

However, Elasticsearch still does not support relational queries out of the box. You could denormalize your data before every sync, but that has the potential for complicating the sync process very fast.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Elasticsearch is currently our log aggregator and SIEM. It is collecting Windows Event Logs, Syslog, DNS logs and HIDS logs. We use it in the IT department, but its reach is far and wide and collects data from every domain machine we have. The problems it solves are numerous! We have dashboards set up for authentication activity, firewall event and VPN activity. With a single glance, it's easy to understand the data and move on to other tasks. In the event of an incident, the detail that is able to be gleaned is incredible. The SIEM app has a working Timeline feature that allows you to simply drag and drop events when investigating an issue. Host intrusion is done by a third-party app but is able to ship the data right to Elasticsearch for easy processing, storage, and display.
  • Log storage efficiency - We have millions of events a day and are able to keep 90 days worth for under 1TB of on disk space.
  • Dashboards - Technically through Kibana(but I consider the entire stack as part of Elasticsearch.) Dashboards are easy to manipulate and create from scratch. Many shippers have premade dashboards ready for day one, too.
  • Speed - Have you ever searched an indexed database of 200 million events and found an answer in a matter of seconds? You could with Elasticsearch.
  • Free/self-hosted can be a nightmarish amount of work. When you break it, it's easy to lose data.
  • Documentation is thorough at times, but there still seems to be holes in some components. For instance, PacketBeat doesn't explicitly tell you best practices for DNS logging, and I had to use a different resource to get an answer.
  • Pricing - The free tier is excellent, but it's a significant jump up to get the machine learning modules, endpoint security and more.
Easiest recommendation of my career. The capability and speed are out of this world, and pricing compared to enterprise logging solutions is a fraction of the cost. That'd come with a caveat, that you must be ready to devote some time to it to learn it and get it working. It's not turnkey, but it's one of the best all-around.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organisation is currently using Elasticsearch for the Elasticstack functionality. Elasticstack gives us functionality to collect, aggregate, search and alert on logging. Kibana, which runs within the Elasticstack, gives us the functionality to create neat dashboards which we use within every layer of our organisation. This addresses the need for various levels of insight across the organisation.
  • Complete package.
  • Open-source.
  • Complex query mechanism.
  • Complex architecture to set up and optimize.
Elasticsearch is very well suited within an IT architecture where a lot of open-source software is already being used and where the developers strongly appreciate open-source software. Elasticsearch might be less appropriate in an organisation where there is less space to master the tool. The tool is quite difficult to learn once you start working on the CLI-level search queries.
Maria Sousa | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We're using Elasticsearch for indexing most of our data, allowing for blazing-fast searches. We store massive time-series data volumes from thousands of IoT sensors that Elasticsearch handles brilliantly, making metrics available in realtime. We're also running dashboards and canvas in Kibana, fed from Elasticsearch, which gets updated in realtime.
  • Performance.
  • Ease of set-up.
  • Tuning for ingress performance can be tricky.
  • Merged documents can become a bottleneck.
Elasticsearch really excels in search performance, so if you have massive amounts of data you need to search from, Elasticsearch is surely a great fit. I woud advise against using it as the main database or the only source of truth, because data corruption can happen in rare cases, and in that case a reindexing will have to take place.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The way we set it up usually for our customers, Elasticsearch improves developer velocity by allowing to quickly search through millions of log messages. It is usually used by the development and operations team.
  • Log handing
  • Full-text search
  • Easier to operate
  • Easier to understand its bottlenecks
It is well suited for searching through logs generated by an application running in production, staging, testing or development.
Mark Freeman, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Elasticsearch is being used to store and search architecture standards, guidance, and other documents pertaining to software architectures. When used with the Spring Java Framework, it is extremely easy to set up custom queries.
  • Search queries based on Java class member names.
  • Very detailed queries through the standard library.
  • Extremely fast.
  • Easy to index.
  • Ability to search content when data only in fields.
  • Query syntax could be made simpler.
  • Auto sharding.
Not great for highly structured data where SQL thrives, e.g., heavy use of JOINs. Not great for image data.
Erlon Sousa Pinheiro | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In a cloud universe where we have hundreds or even thousand of servers to manage, is is a huge challenge to figure out the root cause of issues, it is totally unacceptable keep this sort of environment without a reliable logging and analysis system. Being part of the ELK stack, Elasticsearch give us what is necessary to handle this huge amount of data. I can't imagine our environments without Elasticsearch nowadays.
  • Centralized logging
  • Easy content searching
  • Handle tons of data
  • Poor documentation
  • Not so easy at the first contact
  • Hard to debugging issues
Elasticsearch is a great tool, but remember as every other tool, needs knowledge and expertise to work with. My first option would be using the cloud version provided by Elastic company, but unfortunately it is over my budget, then I need to manage by myself. Also according to your company's area, it wouldn't be possible to keep your data into third's cloud environment. In this case, there is no option other than keeping it by yourself.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Elasticsearch is used as a full-text search solution in most of my use cases. We have another analytics us -case which uses Elasticsearch for both text search and aggregation use-cases.
  • Extremely easy to get started and great documentation.
  • Excellent for full-text use cases.
  • Also used for analytics and Kibana UX is great for visualization.
  • Encountered scaling challenges with large data sets (typically in petabytes).
  • Performance issues for raw aggregation use-cases.
  • Every contract (request/response) is in JSON which is not optimal. No support for protobuffs or GRPC.
Elasticsearch is great for full-text search and some aggregation use-cases. It is ideal for small to medium-sized data sets.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The most crucial piece of infrastructure behind my company's whole product line is Elasticsearch. Our company's big selling point is an extremely flexible data model for our customers who send us their data. We want them to be able to send us data in almost whatever shape or form they want (as long as it's valid JSON we'll take it) and yet, make it still searchable. And you know how we store that nearly-unrestricted free-form data? Elasticsearch!
  • 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.
  • Elasticsearch paid support could be much better. Not only is it really expensive, but the reps just don't seem to be that knowledgeable and keep linking us to support documentation we've already found and read.
  • I wouldn't call it missing functionality or a part that's hard to use perse, but upgrading from ES 5 to ES 6 is a PITA. Maaaan did they mess up a part of their data model so bad that when migrating, you have to restructure almost all your queries and transform almost all your data! I don't want to go into too many details here as some people may not be clued in on the concept of mapping types, but you can read more about it here https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/6.0/breaking-changes-6.0.html.
  • This is no longer a problem in ES 6 but in versions 5 and before, reindexing is a PITA. You have to almost bring down the whole cluster to fix small problems such as missing fields or wrong types.
Elasticsearch's best use case is when you want to store loosely-structured data and be able to search for it near-instantly. And you want to do that in a highly tolerant distributed system. My company doesn't use it this way but I've heard of other companies using ES to store system logs. Another company uses it to store giant store-catalogs.
Gary Davis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Elasticsearch is used on our B2B and B2C eCommerce websites to provide fast and powerful search capabilities for products. Search by title, artist, or various facets like genre, price-range and availability-date results in a list of products that the user can then drill down or continue searching within the result list. Within the organization, Elasticsearch is used by the programmers in the IT department.
  • Search results are provided very quickly.
  • The search results are accurate.
  • Search results contain details on the accuracy of each hit.
  • There is a steep learning curve for this product so what is most useful for developers is good documentation including examples and sample applications.
Initially, we were using Elasticsearch for just product searches. It is also becoming useful as our product repository to display all data needed for the product detail pages.
Gedson Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Elasticsearch is being used for multiple purposes in multiple projects: centralized log management, APM, Metrics Collection as a TSDB, and as a replacement for traditional OLAP databases. It provides a high-performance indexing and search engine, which has become an invaluable tool addressing hard problems that would otherwise be very difficult to solve.
  • Ingress and indexing.
  • Searching.
  • Aggregations.
  • Aggregations on top of other aggregations.
  • Encryption at rest.
  • Has a performance penalty when using inked documents.
Elasticsearch is so versatile and so easy to set up that it's really a no-brainer including it in most projects as the indexing and search engine components, as well as for analytics and aggregations. It's not so well-suited to be used as the main database, as there's a minor risk of data loss.
Jose Adan Ortiz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Elasticsearch has been a big help for us. We used to work with Application Performance Management Tools that need another layer of visualization and data treatment, and with Elasticsearch we have delivered better insights for our customers.
We use Elasticsearch at our Technology & Services Department to address these issues for our customers:
- Customized Dashboards.
- Anomaly Detection.
- Metrics Predictability.
  • Anomaly detection. It can find patterns over a wide variety of metrics and values.
  • Behind the walls, Elasticsearch has a robust distributed architecture to support queries and data processing, and it is easy to maintain and scale.
  • Elasticsearch has a new Elastic Cloud SaaS solution which is very easy to deploy, set up, and scale with all features and more.
  • Elasticsearch has an important security layer to separate access to data and dashboards.
  • If you want to explode Elasticsearch's capabilities, you need to have a medium-high SQL and Database knowledge.
  • The user interface is heavy in Java requirements, and sometimes you can get some lag displaying heavy results for heavy queries.
  • It will be helpful if you can construct Logstash queries with a drag&drop based user interface.
Elasticsearch can be used perfectly inside a site for searching features in order to respond quickly to user queries. It can be used to act as a Centralized Log Server, where you can define events based on pattern detection for anomaly detection.
Elasticsearch has potent visualization features with Canvas and OOB Dashboards that can respond to business and technical requirements.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
ElasticSearch is used to store all searchable data indices from our product. We use ElasticSearch because it is extremely fast, highly available, and able to meet the demand of our product. We were using a different index-based search technology before, and it failed terribly. We migrated to ElasticSearch and have been very happy with the results.
  • Easy to install
  • Easy to use/lots of documentation
  • Easy to scale up as demand increases
  • The price point for the X-Pack plugins (ie. Security, Alerting, etc.) is a bit high, especially if you only want to do something small and simple and you don't need to leverage the full power of the plugin
  • Configuring the right hardware and capacity planning (when at scale) can get really tricky. In order to get the best performance, a lot of tweaking is needed, and not all of the secret tricks are documented
  • Getting used to ElasticSearch's query language was a bit of an adjustment. You really have to delve into defining analyzers and tokenizers in order to get application-specific results
ElasticSearch is great when you need a lot of data indexed really fast, as well as when you need to retrieve a large number of documents based on a complex query. Searching is super-fast.

If you need a large data store for documents where not everything needs to be indexed, don't use JUST ElasticSearch. We use one KV database system to store all of our data and use ElasticSearch as our Index. All searches are run off of ElasticSearch, and the main data store that it pulls from is the other database.
Ben Williams | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use it to log the details of our RPA processes as they run through their production and development environments. They log back checkpoints, statues and error messages back to the Kibana database we use in conjunction with Elasticsearch.
  • Powerful beats modules.
  • Later number of input/output pipelines.
  • Open documentation.
  • Documentation is often incomplete.
  • Forums are very full but misleading.
  • The programs don't work well together. They have different methodology and flavors in each.
  • Different configurations in each element make it difficult to use.
It works well for what we need. Short sharp logs of data from ongoing consistent processes.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Elasticsearch (ES) is being used to measure the performance metrics of our web crawlers for our web metrics department. They employ a series of crawlers: setting up data feeds to an ELK stack to measure and monitor organic messages related to our marketing campaigns. It primarily allows us to bring advanced analytics in-house.
  • Free of SQL: ES does not have the overhead of relying on SQL. In fact, you can use most (if not all) DBMs out there.
  • Java: Normally, this is not a strength: Java is slow and cumbersome. I believe in this case, it's truly a feature: by utilizing a language with universal support, it makes ES VERY DevOps friendly, simply by being able to focus on Problem-oriented vs Solutions-based thinking.
  • Although ES has been known to consume RAM, it's very flexible, and I have implemented on a number of distinct hardware configuration with success.
  • Linux: It's not locked down to an OS (which is the way of the future), and as a result-running it on Linux means you get the power of Linux, in a data science package.
  • Elastic Search IS a resource hog: most of the time, I will run ES on a dedicated VM (often a dedicated blade, too!) and allow the other components of the stack to run on separate blades/VMs.
  • Works great for small projects, but is NOT industrial strength: When you are performing a data architecture project, where you are capturing and mining datasets, ES is fine, until you start getting into much denser data sources (orders to TBs), such that ES will violate Data integrity.
  • It only supports JSON output: Which is very friendly to a lot of DevOps/Data Architecture projects but may become a hassle when your endpoints require CVS, XML, etc.
Elasticsearch is great for development/research projects: It's fast, and *fairly* simple to set up. Project ideas of the calibre of: Watching a marketing feed from Twitter, or scraping sites. But for High availability in (say) a SCADA environment, probably not helpful. Though, I would recommend it for logging system nodes: such as a data center, trouble ticketing dashboard, or health/status visualizations.
January 10, 2019

The Best Available

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable, full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. We use this in our IT department, but also resell it as part of a predictive AIOps platform that offers automation for many of the tedious tasks that data center staff struggle with every day.
  • Search
  • Correlation
  • Analysis
  • Big data
  • Pagination
  • Presentation
  • Mapping
Elasticsearch is a great fit for a data lake environment that is being created to get rid of the typical siloed environment in so many data centers today. Being able to easily search, analyze, and correlate device information in easy to read JSON files is crazy valuable to our internal team.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Elasticsearch to power a web search engine that allows users of our web platform to search for products, content, and more. With Elasticsearch we were able to quickly and effectively develop and deploy a search solution that is fast, scalable, and was a breeze for our developers to implement.
  • Lightning fast
  • Easily scalable
  • Powerful feature set
  • Additional complexities when in need of frequent & rapid updates to the Elasticsearch data set
  • New syntax can be confusing, particularly with advanced features and more powerful queries
Elasticsearch is the gold standard for text-based search. Across large data sets it performs admirably, and we will certainly make it our first choice search solution in the future. For a use case where needs are simple and regular database queries might suffice, Elasticsearch may or may not provide any benefits.
Anatoly Geyfman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Elasticsearch for our online (realtime) search engine. We've indexed over 2 billion documents, including every physician, hospital, and clinic in the United States. We started using ES from the beginning since I had a bunch of great experiences with the technology from my last job. We load data into Elasticsearch from multiple locations, including Postgres and BigQuery. On top of Elasticsearch, we've built a number of analytics tools that let us not only search but also deliver analytics for our stored data -- like top physicians performing a specific service and geography-based analyses. Overall we're super happy with Elasticsearch.
  • Super-fast search on millions of documents. We've got over 2 billion documents in our index and the retrieve speeds are still in the < 1-second range.
  • Analytics on top of your search. If you organize your data appropriately, Elasticsearch can serve as a distributed OLAP system
  • Elasticsearch is great for geographic data as well, including searching and filtering with geojson, and a variety of geospatial algorithms.
  • Elasticsearch is highly distributed, but it takes time to tune so you get the right performance out of your cluster.
  • The query language is not SQL, so it's not a straightforward conversion from an RDBMS to Elasticsearch for searching through data.
  • There are lots of ways to insert data into Elasticsearch, and some are better than others (batch vs. single insert). Need to experiment with your own data and environment.
Elasticsearch is extremely well suited for structured (faceted) search, full-text search, and analytics workloads. Elasticsearch and the ELK stack are also a good fit for operations teams that want to be able to interrogate their logs in an online (read: fast) query tool. Elastic is amazing at creating super fast search experiences over very large datasets, where traditional RDBMS systems are either too costly or too slow.
Tarun Mangukiya | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Elasticsearch is being used for multiple purposes at Iconscout. Starting from a search engine to viewing detailed analytics. We're even using it for logging of the server. It helps us to query through the millions of data easily and efficiently.
  • Fast Search through millions of data
  • Uses a very limited storage to store the data - high compression
  • Easy to get started & configure
  • Their documentation needs a lot of imporvement
  • Difficult to understand query language
  • New updates are difficult to adopt
Elasticsearch has a very fast an efficient searching process. If you've searched a heavy project, you can't just be dependent on databases. Plus, they have a REST API for everything, making it easy to use with any programming language or database.
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