Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is an open source analytics, storage and search engine developed by Elasticsearch B.V. and first released in 2010. It's a distributed software written in Java and built on top of Apache Lucene.The latter is used for indexing and searching data via a REST API.

It is often used with Kibana, a data visualization platform, and Logstash, a data processing pipeline, which are tools developed and maintained by the same company. Together they form what's referred to as the ELK Stack.

Grafana, while not part of the ELK stack, is another open source tool often used with with Elasticsearch for visualizing metrics such as memory, CPU usage and system I/O.

Elasticsearch provides complex search functionality, such as auto-completion, handling synonyms or even correcting typos. But, it is also used as an analytics platform by querying structured data for instance:

• Analyzing application logs and system metrics
• Send events to Elasticsearch
• Forecast future values with machine learning and anomality detection.

Since Elasticsearch is distributed by nature, it scales very well in terms of increasing data volumes and query throughput.