Elastic Launches New Capabilities Across its Solutions, Enabling Customers to Optimize for Cost, Performance, Insight and Flexibility

With the general availability of searchable snapshots, users can retain and search their data on low-cost object stores such as AWS S3, Microsoft Azure Storage and Google Cloud Storage, which can significantly reduce storage costs. Searchable snapshots support a new cold tier capability, which is now generally available and also available in Elastic Cloud, cutting infrastructure costs by up to 50% with minimal performance impact.

New in Elastic 7.11, the beta of schema on read with runtime fields gives users the ability to define the schema for their index at query time. Users can choose between flexibility and cost efficiency with schema on read or blazing fast performance with schema on write, all in one stack. 

Expanded capabilities in Elastic Enterprise Search include the introduction of a new web crawler for Elastic App Search and support for Box as a content source inside Elastic Workplace Search. The powerful web crawler retrieves information from publicly accessible websites to make that content easily searchable in App Search engines, and the schema is inferred upon ingestion and can be updated in near real time with one click.

Elastic Observability introduces new topline views for Elastic APM and Elastic Metrics, making it easy for users to quickly spot and triage application and infrastructure performance issues. The service health view in Elastic APM accelerates root cause analysis and troubleshooting, giving users the ability to quickly inspect the performance and health of individual services in one place. A new resource heatmap in Elastic Metrics allows users to toggle from a high-level view to inspect what is happening on an individual host with ease.

Updates and new features launched across Elastic solutions include:

Elastic Stack

• Allowing users to retain and search more data with searchable snapshots on low-cost object stores and the new cold data tier.
• Leveraging schema on read with runtime fields, giving users the choice between flexibility and cost efficiency with schema on read or blazing fast performance with schema on write.
• Providing the flexibility to create, manage and monitor alerts and notifications across the Elastic Stack and external systems with a new generally available alerting framework.

Elastic Enterprise Search

• Making content from publicly accessible websites easily searchable with the new web crawler for Elastic App Search.
• Adding Box as a content source to Elastic Workplace Search with a prebuilt connector and document-level permissions.
• Extending granular access controls with document-level permissions for Atlassian Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud for Elastic Workplace Search.

Elastic Observability

• Accelerating root cause analysis and troubleshooting with a new service health overview in Elastic APM.
• Introducing a new host details view in the Elastic Metrics app to help users troubleshoot infrastructure issues faster and narrow down next steps of an investigation.
• Adding more context to application troubleshooting workflows by automatically linking logs and traces with new logging libraries in Elastic Common Schema (ECS).

Elastic Security

• Automating detection and operationalizing analytics with prebuilt machine learning jobs and detection rules supporting MITRE sub-techniques.
• Streamlining SOC workflows and accelerating response times with more customizable alert notifications and an expanded set of rule actions.
• Driving efficient threat hunting, alert triage and investigations with an updated Timeline workspace and improved accessibility features.

Elastic Cloud

• Scaling and streamlining cloud operations with autoscaling of data and machine learning nodes.
• Enhancing cross-cluster replication (CCR) and cross-cluster search (CCS) between regions and cloud providers to break down data silos and improve search performance.

Supporting Quotes:

• “I am really excited about new features in Elasticsearch - especially searchable snapshots. It is a common architecture design, storing snapshots to S3 as a cheap data backup. However, having this data searchable expands our options and could allow us to reduce the total cost of service,” said Marcel Matus, cloud services development manager, SAP Concur. “Cold data with S3 replicas has the benefits of both price and performance. In the future, I am looking forward to exploring the frozen tier for its usability and performance.“
• “These critical new capabilities illustrate Elastic’s ongoing commitment to continuous innovation and helping customers adapt to new requirements at speed and scale,” said Ashutosh Kulkarni, chief product officer, Elastic. “The new capabilities in 7.11 will enable our users to take advantage of more data at lower costs, to get deeper operational and security insights into their business, all through the power of search.”