logoalt Hacker News

unethical_bantoday at 5:45 PM3 repliesview on HN

I work in infosec and several popular platforms use elasticsearch for log storage and analysis.

I would never. Ever. Bet my savings on ES being stable enough to always be online to take in data, or predictable in retaining the data it took in.

It feels very best-effort and as a consultant, I recommend orgs use some other system for retaining their logs, even a raw filesystem with rolling zips, before relying on ES unless you have a dedicated team constantly monitoring it.


Replies

kentmtoday at 6:30 PM

Do you happen to know if ES was the only storage? Its been almost 8 years, but if I was building a log storage and analysis system, then I'd push the logs to S3 or some other object store and build an ES index off of that S3 data. From the consumer's perspective, it may look like we're using ES to store the data, but we have a durable backup to regenerate ES if necessary.

toenailtoday at 5:49 PM

Dunno, I've had three node clusters running very stable for years. Which issues did you have that require a full team?

show 2 replies
cyberpunktoday at 6:50 PM

Meh i run hundreds of es nodes, its gotten a lot more friendly these days, but yes it can be a bit unforgiving at times.

Turns out running complicated large distributed systems requires a bit more than a ./apply, who would have guessed it?