King Abdullah University of Science and Technology is a graduate research university located in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. Founded in 2009, it provides research and graduate training programs and is the kingdom’s first mixed-gender university.We met recently with Stanislav Flachs, Manager of the Systems, Storage, Automation &amp; Workflows teams, and Gianluca Castellani, lead for the Automation &amp; Workflows team. The two analyse time-consuming tasks and processes to find ways of improving them. They are both actively managing the Elasticsearch clusters of the university. Flachs and Castellani&nbsp;started using the Elastic Stack so they could connect the data with the visualisation and alerting systems they needed.<hr/>Prior to Elastic, what infrastructure issues were&nbsp;the university encountering?Gianluca Castellani:&nbsp;In the past, we were using different tools to monitor our infrastructure. There was always an issue that persisted. These different systems were not meant to work together. Our previous solutions were scattered and not flexible. We always had to come up with creative ways of connecting the data with the visualization and the alerting we needed. It is crucial for us to have visibility on our systems. Not having a holistic tool to monitor and analyze our operational data was just cumbersome. If you don’t monitor properly, that can have catastrophic consequences on your system. We didn’t have a tool to look efficiently at what we were doing.Why did you choose the Elastic Stack to help solve your infrastructure issues?Stanislav Flachs:&nbsp;We considered a few options — looking at commercial and open-source solutions. We finally decided to go for the Elastic Stack, partially because of the licensing model. This was not the only reason, however. The community spirit so characteristic of Elastic really attracted us. We wanted to be part of it and it just resonated with us better. We are all programmers. We are keen to contribute and work on this. Also, our researchers were already familiar with the solution. Thinking further ahead about providing resources internally to our research and business communities, it just made more sense to use something they already adopted. The learning curve with the Elastic Stack was also quite smooth, making the adoption easier.Castellani:&nbsp;We embraced Elasticsearch for many reasons, such as scalability, easy set up and management, its large user community, flexible and robust data ingestion, and its intuitive data visualization.How has the university benefited from the Elastic Stack?Flachs:&nbsp;We are using Elastic to store heterogeneous data and feed other tools already used in the organization. We store end-user communication by writing ad hoc Elasticsearch plugins for Slack and regular emails. Then we can provide dashboards, reports and statistics to the upper management so they can have KPIs about our operational data and our systems. The Elastic Stack is at the heart of our IT <a href="https://www.elastic.co/observability/infrastructure-monitoring" target="_self">infrastructure monitoring</a>, and it is a key tool for our daily activities. We can check alerts, CPU and memory utilization, workflow characterization, and so much more. This allows us to improve our capacity planning, so we can now better plan for our infrastructure upgrades and ultimately we are saving time and money.What are the next steps with the Elastic Stack?Castellani:&nbsp;Since we started using it, the Elastic Stack has proven to be an easy-to-use and flexible platform that can host any type of data whilst gathering everything into one place, and it accommodates multiple use cases. We are now working on implementing the security feature to manage the access to the resources at a more granular level. We are also planning on using machine learning to analyze logs from different sources and to find anomalies in our systems. Our goal is to do intrusion detection and foresee any hardware failure.Today, after more than 1 year from our first cluster, we are still discovering new functionalities, creating new applications and getting new insights from our data. To conclude, we want simply to say that Elasticsearch has changed the way we approach data. And the old saying: ‘When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail’, has become: ‘When you have Elasticsearch, everything looks like JSON.’<hr/> <img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt9593b61b9b70391e/5cd42b819033f96a5b03190c/Stanislav_Flachs_KAUST.jpg" alt="Stanislav Flachs" width="118" height="170" style="float: left;width: 118;height: 170;margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;text-align: left;"/>Stanislav Flachs is a battle-tested veteran of IT operations, passionate about DevOps culture and technological innovation. In his role as Systems &amp; Storage Manager at KAUST, Stanislav is responsible for implementing and operating compute and storage solutions that scale and adapt to evolving user needs. When he is not behind the keyboard, you’ll find Stanislav underwater exploring the blue depths of the Red Sea. <img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt80499de7db0b5e18/5cd42b82168581ef56e8040e/Gianluca_Castellani_KAUST.png" data-sys-asset-uid="bltf47e834a633e2ad8" alt="Gianluca Castellani" width="148" height="160" style="float: left;width: 148;height: 160;margin: 0 10px 10px 0;text-align: left;"/>Gianluca Castellani is a Research Computing “jack of all trades, master of many”. His main area of interest is making large computing systems robust, resilient and efficient using testing, monitoring and automation. His true passions are creating solutions and solving extrinsic problems based on the needs of his colleagues and himself.

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Infrastructure Monitoring at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Liefery walks us through their Elastic journey that helped enable their business analytics capabilities with Elasticsearch and Kibana as core components.

Founded in 2014, <a href="https://www.liefery.com">Liefery</a> is a delivery company based in Berlin. They provide transparent and plannable same day and next day delivery services. They are also developing urban delivery concepts for the future. By entering the parcel delivery market, their goal is to create the modern customer experience that people expect. This means predictable, plannable parcel delivery at the terms and at the time that suits the receiver.

We recently met with&nbsp;Simon Stemplinger, CTO at Liefery. He walked us through the company’s Elastic&nbsp; journey that helped enable their business analytics capabilities with Kibana as a core component. As he and Liefery found out, the Elastic Stack is applicable to<a href="/solutions">&nbsp;more than just log analytics</a>.

<hr>
Before using Elastic, what issues were you looking at solving?

Simon Stemplinger: We develop and run our own software platform to manage and support our delivery services. Our software spans multiple separate apps and services on multiple application cluster nodes. Looking through log files was quite painful, and therefore it was something we only did when we really had to.

Furthermore, we were looking for a business intelligence (BI) software to help our colleagues in the operational teams (where we manage our drivers and the parcels) make sense of our business data and keep track and improve our operational metrics.

We looked at a BI tool, as well as several hosted cloud-based logging apps, before coming across the Elastic Stack as a self-hosted solution for log analytics. I was familiar with the Elasticsearch DB from a previous project where we used it for a full-text product search and knew that it performed well and could handle large amounts of data. We gave the Elastic Stack a test drive and were immediately excited by the combination of the power of the Elasticsearch database and the flexibility and ease of use of the Kibana visualizations. Kibana has quickly become the go-to tool for our answering all questions about our business data.

So you started using the Elastic Stack for log analytics. What other Elastic Stack use cases have you carried out?

Stemplinger: When we started centralizing our logs using the Elastic Stack, several initiatives were also launched around reporting and service quality management. Most of these initiatives were using Excel.&nbsp;It was very tedious and the user adoption was slow. At some point our engineering team thought:&nbsp;"Kibana is great for data visualisation. Why don’t we just try throwing our business data in there and see how far we can get?"&nbsp;

I sat down with our Head of Operations and presented him in a demo how to create visualizations and dashboards using Kibana. He was immediately hooked. Despite not being a technical person, he managed to build in a short time quite in-depth and detailed data visualizations and dashboards. We created system health dashboards for IT and operational quality dashboards for our business teams. We then set up large flat-screen TVs with Raspberry PIs attached showing these dashboards during normal work hours. Kibana became our new de-facto quality and reporting BI tool.&nbsp;

Then we started using the commercial features, as we wanted to widen our user base to all parts of our company. The security feature of the Elastic Stack lets us give certain users read-only access or limited access to certain indices. This allows us to give read-only access to a wider part of the company while giving write access only to certain trained users. In the future we might extend this to allow access to certain data (e.g. financial data) only to privileged users.&nbsp;

Our Kibana based reporting solution is still widely popular in the organization. In addition we use the opportunity of having both all application log and business data in one database to do all kinds of business alerting (detection of brute force attacks, API issues, pathologic business data, etc.).

What are the future projects you’re looking at developing with the Elastic Stack?

Stemplinger:&nbsp;Having made a name for ourselves as an innovative software-driven company in the urban logistics space, we are starting to offer our software as SaaS software platform to everyone. A number of key players in the industry have already expressed interest and are starting POC projects in various stages. The Elastic Stack enables us to extend our service offering with a powerful analytics add-on that we can pre-configure with help reports and visualizations out of the box, but that is also highly customizable to our clients’ needs.

Can you tell me more about the impact Elastic has had on your company and the team?

Stemplinger: We experienced tons of process improvements. Today, using the Elastic Stack, the business team can save time on their daily review calls on service quality, they don’t need to allocate more time to actually prepare the report and can just at the quality reports in Kibana. In a similar way, the developers can also quickly detect issues using performance dashboards on which they monitor key metrics like the response time, they also enhanced the data with users IDs to track what’s being done by who.&nbsp;

In a way, Elastic has helped our teams become more responsive and agile.&nbsp;The Elastic Stack helped us overall to get more insight into our data. The result manifests first and foremost in better service quality, less shipping delays, better predictions, as well as more informed meetings and discussions. It allows us to quickly troubleshoot technical problems and gives both tech and business teams a very powerful tool in their arsenal.

<hr>
<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltf7afce26b89a5b33/bltf47e834a633e2ad8/5c94d0e4d06594542e962053/download" data-sys-asset-uid="bltf47e834a633e2ad8" alt="Simon Stemplinger" width="148" height="160" style="float:left; width: 148px; height: 160px; margin:0 10px 10px 0;">

Simon Stemplinger <a href="https://twitter.com/stemps"> (@stemps)</a>&nbsp;is the CTO at Liefery. He is a hands-on developer with a passion for databases, and is a big fan of the Elastic Stack. He spent the last 5 years building up the software of the company; from the first lines of code to a fully featured last-mile logistics software platform and SaaS product.&nbsp;

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Using the Elastic Stack for Business Intelligence at Liefery

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送信することにより、Elasticの<a href="/jp/legal/terms-of-use" target="_self">利用規約</a>を読み、同意したものと見なされます。また、関連する製品やサービスについて、上記で提供された情報を使用してElasticから<a href="/jp/legal/privacy-statement#how-we-use-the-information" target="_self">連絡する</a>場合があることを認めたことになります。詳細については、<a href="/jp/legal/privacy-statement/" target="_self">Elasticのプライバシー</a>ポリシーをご覧ください。これらの同意についてはいつでもオプトアウトすることが可能です。

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Infrastructure Monitoring at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Using the Elastic Stack for Business Intelligence at Liefery

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