Elastic

Elastic is a San Francisco and Amsterdam-headquartered software company developing open-source tools to make data usable in real time. Through its foundational search technology, called Elastic (ELK) Stack, it offers Elastic enterprise search, kibana, Elastic observability, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Beats, and elastic security for businesses. The company has offices across North America, Asia, and Europe. Companies that have used the software include Netflix, Twilio, Microsoft, Uber, and Slack.

ELK Stack consists of open-source tools that power their enterprise software products. ELK Stack includes Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. The tools are capable of being used for diverse use cases and include features like machine learning, security, and reporting.

Kibana is a free and open user interface that allows users to visualize data through Elasticsearch and navigate the ELK stack. This includes allowing users to track query loads to understand request flows through applications, in visualizations to help users understand these flows. Kibana includes machine learning to allow users to analyze ingested data and discover data to detect anomalies and troubleshoot issues. Kibana offers a series of dashboards to allow for better visualization and can be integrated with other services to build more creative visualizations of the data.

Elastic's ELK Stack is developed to allow users to connect, scale, and explore data with various turn-key integrations for cloud-native infrastructure, applications, security activity and context, content repositories, and more. The ingestion methods offered by ELK Stack include the Elastic Agent, which is a central ingestion management agent; web crawlers; data connectors; APIs; Elastic language clients, allowing users to build solutions in a language of choice; and logstash, which allows users to collect and transform data.

Elastic is committed to its open-source base for the ELK Stack, as this allowed the company to develop the tools and perfect the core. Further, the company ensures that the open code allows the ELK Stack and Elasticsearch can continue to evolve to best suit the needs of the community of users and their customers, while also allowing those communities and customers to evolve their own solutions on top of the code. This approach is also known as open-core, in which Elastic's main offerings are available as open source and can be accessed, used, and iterated upon without paying Elastic. Meanwhile, Elastic continues to offer enterprise software solutions through the Elastic Cloud, which include various features and functionalities not included in their open-source projects.

Elastic Cloud is the platform on which Elastic offers its products. The cloud allows users to deploy the products they want to use across an organization or can be deployed in multiple clouds, while offering security and scalability. The Elastic Cloud is developed to be capable of deploying quickly and reducing the cost of ownership for users when compared to deploying multiple on-site tools while offering various data tiers for variable storage costs. The cloud allows users to take data snapshots, which can be searches and visualized to give organizations a better view of their data stacks.

Elastic's original and core product, Elasticsearch, is offered as an open-source software product and as an enterprise search product with greater functionality. Elasticsearch is a distributed, representational state transfer (REST) search and analytics engine capable of addressing a growing number of use cases that centrally store a client's data for each client's own search purposes. Various types of searches, such as structured, unstructured, geo, text, and metric, can be conducted with the software. Its aggregations can be used for analyzing and finding patterns in data.

Built upon Elasticsearch, Elastic Observability offers a data observability solution allowing users to monitor and gain insights from their systems, whether those systems were cloud-native or for distributed users. The observability tool is developed to work across hybrid cloud environments and to help organizations adopt cloud-native architectures with confidence as they can see what is going on in those environments. Observability ingests metrics, logs, and traces from applications and infrastructures; can help eliminate tool silos by ingesting data from all business operations; and can be used to accelerate software delivery.

Elastic also offers security software developed to investigate and respond to complex threats through a unification of the capabilities of SIEM, endpoint security, and cloud security. The tool is built to detect and respond to threats at speed; streamline SOC workflows through automation and with orchestration; make threat intelligence actionable; assess a cloud posture and protect cloud-based workloads; and prevent, collect, detect, and respond to threats with a single security agent.