When to use Elasticsearch

February 17, 2022 |

3 minutes read

What is elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is an open-source search/analytics engine that allows you to store, search, and analyze huge data quickly and in real-time and give back answers in milliseconds. It searches for an index, instead of a text and that is why it has such a fast response.

Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Apache Lucene library.

It uses a structure based on documents instead of tables and schemas. It comes with extensive REST APIs for storing and searching the data. At its core, you can think of Elasticsearch as a server that can process JSON requests and give you back JSON data.

Elasticsearch is compatible with many programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, PHP, C#, Ruby, Python, Go, and many more.

Since 2015 Elasticsearch has been available on AWS.

When to use Elasticsearch

#1 Text search

You want Elasticsearch when you’re doing a lot of text search, where traditional RDBMS databases are not performing really well (poor configuration, acts as a black-box, poor performance). Elasticsearch is highly customizable, extendable through plugins. You can build a robust search without much knowledge quite fast.

#2 Logging and analysis

Another edge case is that a lot of people use it to store logs from various sources, so they can analyze them and make sense of it. In this case, Kibana becomes handy. It lets you connect to Elasticsearch clusters and create visualizations straight away. For instance, Loggly is built using Elasticsearch and Kibana.

#3 – Scraping and Combining Public Data

Like log data, the Elastic Stack has plenty of tools to make grabbing and indexing remote data easy. Also, like most document stores, the lack of a strict schema gives the flexibility to take in multiple different sources of data and still keep it all manageable and searchable.

#4 – Event Data and Metrics

It also operates really well on time-series data like metrics and application events. This is another area where the huge Beats ecosystem allows you to easily grab data for common applications. Whatever technologies you use, there’s a pretty good chance that Elasticsearch has the components to grab metrics and events out of the box… and in the rare case that it can’t, adding that capability is really easy.

#5 – Visualizing Data

With tons of charting options, a tile service for geo-data, and TimeLion for time-series data, Kibana is an amazingly powerful and easy-to-use visualization tool. For every use case above there is some visual component handled by Kibana. Once you’re comfortable with the various data ingest tools, you’ll find that Elasticsearch + Kibana will become your go-to tool for visualizing data that you’re trying to wrap your head around.