Gurunavi is a forerunner in Japan among online services providing information on restaurants and other topics, and it has administered a large-scale ICT environment to support those services since early on in its life. Obviously, these systems output a large volume of log data, and analyzing that data previously took up a lot of time and manpower.
Toshiaki Iwamoto is Deputy Section Chief of the Engineering Section in the Development Department at Gurunavi. He recalls the circumstances at the time as follows.
“Around 2016, Gurunavi already had thousands of servers. When there was a breakdown or maintenance was needed, we needed to log in directly to the affected server to check the logs, look up the log with the grep command, copy the log temporarily to a local environment using the scp command, and deal with the problem that way. This investigation process would take over an hour to complete, meaning we could not respond in real time and would have a lot of manual work to do, and this led to oversights and other careless mistakes. As our systems and logs grew bigger and bigger, we increasingly needed something to deal with this workload.”
It was then that Gurunavi came across two Elastic Stack products: Elasticsearch and Kibana.
Elastic Stack enables high-speed real-time search across multiple data sources without downloading the target data to a local environment, through the use of a wide range of provided product components. As the company’s services have multiplied and become more advanced, API calls between applications have become increasingly numerous as well. Given that Gurunavi needs to analyze a multitude of logs, Elastic Stack products were really the optimal solution for its needs. “At the time, there were absolutely no products on the market that could be called competitors, and we decided on Elastic because it was the only choice,” said Mr. Iwamoto of Gurunavi. Gurunavi fully implemented Elasticsearch and Kibana in 2016.