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Elasticsearch is a great open source alternative to Splunk while stacking up to products like Cassandra and Solr
May 24, 2016

Elasticsearch is a great open source alternative to Splunk while stacking up to products like Cassandra and Solr

Ivan Portugal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Elasticsearch

The oil and gas web application is heavily used for monitoring active wells. We need app-specific analytics based on user behavior and error context. Elasticsearch is used to collect arbitrary information during production. Kibana is used to view these messages in an effort to "fix" the app before the user is able to submit a ticket (proactive feature and defect resolution).
  • It indexes anything. Just use structured logging to begin sending messages to it.
  • Kibana, the UI for it, allows you to easily build dashboards with real-time widgets.
  • The REST API for Elasticsearch is well-written, should you choose to incorporate the data on your own custom application.
  • No negative impacts to date.
  • Even though we are only using ElasticSearch for analytics, the possibility of using it for pertinent and supplemental metadata on wells is very possible.
Cassandra and Solr are other products that I haven't used but might be considered "competitors". Splunk is very, very good in terms of search but it seemed limited to logging. It is also quite pricey compared to ElasticSearch which is free.
Web app analytics is a great example of use for it because logging messages isn’t necessarily structured. Elasticsearch does a great job of indexing structured or unstructured data. Think of Elasticsearch and Kibana being an open source "Splunk" replacement. It may not be appropriate to use Elasticsearch for true real-time data. It is not a time series database although it may be used as one. Perhaps a better solution for time series data would be InfluxDB or Graphite, whereas Elasticsearch is more of a search engine.