ElasticSearch

Elasticsearch is a 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.

You can send data in the form of [[JavaScript Object Notation|JSON]] documents to Elasticsearch using the API or ingestion tools such as Logstash and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Elasticsearch automatically stores the original document and adds a searchable reference to the document in the cluster’s index.

It’s a distributed, free and open search and analytics engine for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured. Elasticsearch is primarily known for its simple [[REST APIs]], distributed nature, speed, and scalability, and it is the central component of the Elastic Stack.

The ELK stack is a set of free and open tools for data ingestion, enrichment, storage, analysis, and visualization.

Elasticsearch is scalable, offers many aggregations, and has a great visualization tool that is Kibana. It provides features to help you store, manage, and search time-series data, such as logs and metrics.

Once in Elasticsearch, you can analyze and visualize your data using Kibana and other Elastic Stack features.

Elasticsearch is typically used as the underlying search engine powering applications with simple/complex search features and requirements. Features include:

  • Ability to Index, store, search and analyze large volumes of data quickly and in near real-time.
  • Real-time search and analytics for structured, unstructured, numerical, or geospatial data.
  • Efficiently stores and indexes data in a way to support fast searches.

Elasticsearch uses OpenJDK, so there can be some performance differences compared to the Oracle version of Java.

Elasticsearch has been around for a while and is used by large organizations such as CERN, Facebook, Walmart, Adobe, US Air Force, Shopify, Uber, Pfizer, Vimeo, eBay, Godaddy, and more.