Elasticon, the first Elasticsearch user conference, is coming in a couple of weeks. Hosted in San-Francisco, the agenda promises a lot of interesting use cases and in-depth information about Elasticsearch and the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) analytics stack. It is an 11 hour plane trip away, but here at Comperio we consider Elasticsearch one of the most exciting developments in search today. Not only is it a scalable and flexible search platform but it is also at forefront of combining data analytics, text mining and information retrieval in a single scalable and cohesive platform. So it doesn’t matter if Elasticon is nearly on the other side of the planet, we can’t really miss this opportunity to get on top of the latest developments surrounding Elasticsearch.

At Comperio we’re happy to see that search is becoming so much more than it used to be. Elasticsearch has proven to be a platform that not only does search well, but also integrates documents with data in a way that enables information oriented applications. At the front of this wave of new applications is the ELK stack which makes it easy to build a complete pipeline for analytics. Search analytics, system monitoring or web analytics are all areas where a realtime reporting platform can be built on top of ELK. Combining the data analytics capabilities of Elasticsearch also allows us to build information insight driven applications for our customers, combining offline and realtime text analysis and data aggregation with web based visualization based on D3.js. Especially the real time queries has made it possible for users to drill-down into and compare specific pieces of data in an exploratory manner. These new applications does not only require a fast and scalable technology core, but also solid insight into search technology and an ability to modify it for specific requirements.

On to Elasticon it is no surprise that there is a huge focus on all aspects of ELK, We’re looking forward to see how other companies are adopting the ELK stack to their projects and get new ideas of how we can help our customers bring out the value in their data with the ELK software. There are also some sessions on Shield, the new access security subsystem for Elasticsearch. This is a long asked for component which will surely make integration easier in many projects. We’re also looking forward to the sessions on Elasticsearch and ELK internals as we are now looking into several extensions that we’d like to implement in Elasticsearch.

On to the sessions we’re looking forward to the ELK use cases, especially the “Tackling Security Logs with the ELK” and “The ELK & The Eagle: Search & Analytics for the US Government”. Also ELK internals sessions such as “The Contributor’s Guide to the Kibana” and “Life of an Event in Logstash”, in addition to “Elasticsearch Architecture: Amusing Algorithms and Details on Data Structures”. Building data centric applications is also covered in “Using Elasticsearch to Unlock an Analytical Goldmine”, “Navigating Through the World’s Encyclopedia” and “The ELK Stack for Time Series Data” which we hope can give us some fresh viewpoints on using Elasticsearch in our projects related to intelligence and data mining.

Hope to see some of you in San Francisco :)