At first glance, there may seem to be little not to love about the ELK Stack. It’s open source. It’s free (if you set it up and manage it yourself, at least). It’s a widely used solution with a thriving ecosystem surrounding it. But if you’ve ever actually built and managed an ELK stack environment, you have probably found that the theory doesn’t match the reality. The ELK stack is full of hidden costs, and it often fails to deliver real value over the long term.

Today, we are pleased to announce a partnership with Confluent to jointly develop and deliver an enhanced product experience to the Kafka-Elasticsearch community. Kafka is — and has been since the very early days — an important component of the Elastic ecosystem.

Have you ever tried to search for objects in images? Elasticsearch can help you store, analyze, and search for objects in images or videos. In this quick tutorial, we’ll show you how to build a system for facial recognition with Python. Learn more about how to detect and encode facial information — and find matches in search.

In case you hadn’t heard, we recently released a brand new web crawler for Elastic App Search. The web crawler provides a simple way to ingest publicly available web content and make that content instantly searchable on your website. Configuring the web crawler to start ingesting data from your website is super easy — it’s just a matter of a few clicks. This sounds great, but what if after crawling there are no pages being indexed or you feel some pages are missing?

Data analytics has always been the foundation to drive actions for IT operations--supporting capacity planning, resource optimization, workload rebalancing, cost projections, and security predictions. But now, there are new demands on IT operations to deliver inclusive data intelligence for managers across IT and the business.

Over the past few years, the IoT community has embraced InfluxDB as a cornerstone of the solutions they build. Whether modernizing or greenfield, InfluxDB has helped many in working with vast quantities of sensor and device data as we continue to deliver on our promise of time to awesome for IoT.