Blogs

Hands-on, insight-driven content about observing your production and development environments using Elastic Observability.

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One ES|QL query, 365 days of audit logs: Same search on hot data and searchable snapshots
Observability Labs

One ES|QL query, 365 days of audit logs: Same search on hot data and searchable snapshots

Collect audit logs with the EDOT Collector, then confirm the 365-day retention policy actually applied before an auditor asks you to.

Jeffrey Rengifo
Kubernetes node pressure: Catching the memory drop 7 minutes before the first pod eviction
Observability Labs

Kubernetes node pressure: Catching the memory drop 7 minutes before the first pod eviction

The pod you lose is rarely the pod that grew. This walkthrough follows a per-node anomaly detection alert all the way to the pod whose working set moved.

Jeffrey Rengifo
Kubernetes noisy neighbor in a multi-tenant cluster: Find it with ES|QL
Observability Labs

Kubernetes noisy neighbor in a multi-tenant cluster: Find it with ES|QL

Every pod was Running, and storefront requests under 500 ms still fell from 99.6% to 59%. ES|QL on kubelet metrics found a batch job taking 1.7 of the node's 2 cores, and a 500m cap brought the storefront back above 99%.

Jeffrey Rengifo
Meet Elastic nightshift AI SRE, your always-on SRE coworker
Observability Labs

Meet Elastic nightshift AI SRE, your always-on SRE coworker

Elastic's SRE team has been running Elastic nightshift against our own production environment. It picks up incidents that never triggered an alert and shows its working for every conclusion it reaches.

Luca Wintergerst
Automated root cause analysis for AWS: From a CloudWatch alert to a diagnosed incident in 36 seconds
Observability Labs

Automated root cause analysis for AWS: From a CloudWatch alert to a diagnosed incident in 36 seconds

We broke a live RDS instance with a connection leak, and the workflow came back with the Postgres refusals, the downstream 5xx and a root cause nobody had to write by hand.

Jesse Miller
The service with the most errors was healthy: root cause analysis from logs with ES|QL
Observability Labs

The service with the most errors was healthy: root cause analysis from logs with ES|QL

Metrics ranked three services identically at 19.1%. Four ES|QL queries over the same 4,688 OpenTelemetry log records traced 955 of 956 failure chains back to one of them, and needed no service dependency model to do it.

Jeffrey Rengifo
14 alerts, 1 incident: Measuring alerting rule noise with ES|QL in Elasticsearch
Observability Labs

14 alerts, 1 incident: Measuring alerting rule noise with ES|QL in Elasticsearch

Grouping keys decide how many alerts one incident produces, and because Kibana stamps every alert document with a rule revision, you can measure your alert noise reduction against the same incident that caused the alerts in the first place.

Jeffrey Rengifo
Kubernetes attributes processor v1: What it means for EDOT Collector
Observability Labs

Kubernetes attributes processor v1: What it means for EDOT Collector

Default EDOT Collector setups are fine. Anything custom that queries labels, annotations or container.image.tag quietly stops returning data after EDOT 9.6.

Christos Markou
Two dependencies and one config block: Spring Boot metrics to Elasticsearch over Prometheus remote write
Observability Labs

Two dependencies and one config block: Spring Boot metrics to Elasticsearch over Prometheus remote write

Prometheus remote write forwards Micrometer's Actuator metrics into an Elasticsearch time series data stream. JVM heap, request latency, GC pauses and HikariCP activity all become queryable with ES|QL, and nothing new has to run alongside it.

Christoph Heger
Cut log storage costs with two Elasticsearch data tiers instead of four
Observability Labs

Cut log storage costs with two Elasticsearch data tiers instead of four

Elastic benchmarked one day of logs on SSD with everything older moved to frozen searchable snapshots, and it came out 16x cheaper than keeping all of it hot. The ILM policy and the cost model are both in the post.

Peter Simkins
Temporal Cloud observability in Elastic: 50+ metrics, zero collectors
Observability Labs

Temporal Cloud observability in Elastic: 50+ metrics, zero collectors

Elastic scrapes metrics.temporal.io, so the workflow that has been stuck in Running for an hour turns out to be a task queue nobody is polling, and you find that out before you open a single worker log.

Ishleen Kaur
Not every log deserves 90 days: per-stream retention in Elastic Streams
Observability Labs

Not every log deserves 90 days: per-stream retention in Elastic Streams

AI Partitioning reads your data and proposes child streams. Retention, drops and downsampling then become per-stream settings, so the noisy ones expire on their own schedule.

Peter Simkins