What is Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch is an open-source, RESTful, distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene.  Since its release in 2010, Elasticsearch has quickly become the most popular search engine and is commonly used for log analytics, full-text search, security intelligence, business analytics, and operational intelligence use cases.

Why do you need Elastisearch?

Customers looking for product information from businesses with huge product and client bases face issues such as a long time in product information retrieval.  This leads to poor user experience and, in turn, missing the potential customer.

Lag in search is attributed to the relational database used for the product design, where the data is scattered among multiple tables, and retrieval of meaningful user information requires fetching the data from them.  The Relational Database works comparatively slowly regarding vast amounts of data and brings search results through queries from the database.  Nowadays, businesses are looking for alternate ways to store data in such a way that the retrieval is quick.  This can be achieved by adopting NoSQL rather than RDBMS for storing data.  Elasticsearch is one such NoSQL distributed database.  Elasticsearch relies on flexible data models to build and update visitors’ profiles to meet the demanding workload and low latency required for real-time engagement.

Elasticsearch Products

Here is a complete list of solutions built directly on Elasticsearch.

Logs

With out-of-the-box support for familiar data sources and default dashboards, the Elastic Stack is all about the it-just-works experience.  Ship logs from Kubernetes, MySQL, and more.  Index your data into Elasticsearch and visualize it all in Kibana in minutes.

Metrics

Whether you are monitoring servers, Docker containers, Kubernetes orchestration, Prometheus-style metrics, or application telemetry, a Metricbeat module will get you started in minutes.  And the best part is that data is natively correlated with your logs.

APM

Finding and fixing roadblocks in your code boils down to search.  Our dedicated UI lets you identify bottlenecks and zero in on problematic changes at the code level.  As a result, you get better, more efficient code that leads to a speedier develop-test-deploy loop, faster applications, and better customer experiences.

Uptime

While a service being “up” or “down” might seem binary, the data surrounding each data point isn’t. So give your team the context they need to go well beyond status codes.  With Elastic Uptime, powered by open-source Heartbeat, your availability data works in concert with rich context provided by logs, metrics, and APM — making it simpler to connect the dots, correlate activity, and solve problems quickly.

Site Search

Elastic Site Search provides the tools you need to build a powerful website search without a learning curve.  The maintenance-free crawler keeps content current, while intuitive customization features and robust analytics provide complete control over search relevance.

App Search

The curated experience of Elastic App Search brings the focused power of Elasticsearch to a refined set of APIs and intuitive dashboards.  Leverage seamless scalability, tunable relevance controls, thorough documentation, well-maintained clients, and robust analytics to build a leading search experience quickly.

Workplace Search

Boost your team’s productivity by unifying all your content platforms, Google Drive, Salesforce, etc., into a personalized search experience.  With its ease of deployment, pre-tuned relevance, and intuitive interface, Elastic Workplace Search is the solution for your organizational search needs.

Maps

Analyze your geospatial data with Elastic Maps.  Visualize multiple indices as unique layers in one view to query and correlate across your Elasticsearch data.

SIEM

Everything you love about the Elastic Stack, geared toward security information and event management (SIEM): leverage the speed, scale, and relevance of Elastic SIEM to drive your security operations and threat hunting.

Endpoint Security

Complexity is the enemy of security.  Elastic Endpoint Security is the only endpoint protection product to thoroughly combine prevention, detection, and response into a single, autonomous agent. It’s easy to use, built for speed, and stops threats at the earliest stages of an attack.

You can send data in JSON documents to Elasticsearch using the API or ingestion tools such as Logstash. Elasticsearch automatically stores the original document and adds a searchable reference to the document in the cluster’s index.  You can then search and retrieve the document using the Elasticsearch API.  You can also use Kibana, an open-source visualization tool, with Elasticsearch to visualize your data and build interactive dashboards.

Elasticsearch is open-source software.  You can run Elasticsearch on-premises, on Amazon EC2, or Amazon Elasticsearch Service.  With on-premises or Amazon EC2 deployments, you are responsible for installing Elasticsearch and other necessary software, provisioning infrastructure, and managing the cluster.  Amazon Elasticsearch Service, on the other hand, is a fully managed service, so you don’t have to worry about time-consuming cluster management tasks such as hardware provisioning, software patching, failure recovery, backups, and monitoring.

Summary

We have just scratched the surface with this Elasticsearch overview.  This will give you a 1000-foot view of Elasticsearch and how it can benefit your business.