CoreView is a cloud-based management platform that provides administrators and IT professionals with tools to manage and optimize their Microsoft 365 and Office 365 environments. It offers a range of features including user provisioning, license management, adoption tracking, and security and compliance management.

Searching for better ways to manage Elasticsearch

CoreView has been using Elasticsearch for several years. Though they engaged with the primary managed service support to maintain their deployments, they grew frustrated with the “break-fix” mindset.

“Whenever we had an issue, we had to turn to our provider’s support team and wait a really long time for them to respond,” said Alessandro Lombardi, Senior System Architect at CoreView. “When they did answer, they didn’t always know how to solve the problem.”

The CoreView team was experiencing several challenges with their Elasticsearch deployment, including slow searches, slow indexing and more. They began looking for better solutions to manage their operations.

“We found Opster’s free tools and decided to give it a go,” said Lombardi. “We uploaded a JSON of our infrastructure and were so impressed with the insights we got. We knew it was time to contact the Opster team to learn more. Opster was our first choice for managing Elasticsearch once we started experiencing issues in our system.”

“Opster was our first choice for managing Elasticsearch once we started experiencing issues.”

Alessandro Lombardi | Senior System Architect at CoreView

Optimizing Elasticsearch with Opster’s expert support team

The CoreView and Opster teams began to work on optimizing CoreView’s Elasticsearch clusters. “Opster provided us with so many incredible optimizations for our operation,” said Lombardi. “They had our system working so smoothly, so quickly.”

“Opster provided us with so many incredible optimizations for our operation. They had our system working so smoothly, so quickly.”

Alessandro Lombardi | Senior System Architect at CoreView

Together the teams optimized performance, improved configurations, increased resource utilization for the correct scale and set up all needed notifications and automations. 

“Our new reality is that we don’t discover issues once they’re already issues,” said Lombardi. “We use AutoOps to check our metrics and we actually get pinged proactively by the Opster team, who simply take care of everything.”

“Our new reality is that we don’t discover issues once they’re already issues. We get pinged by the Opster team, who simply take care of everything.”

Alessandro Lombardi | Senior System Architect at CoreView

“The Opster team is just incredible,” Lombardi continued. “They always give us more value than we think we’ll get. If it’s a new feature we need, an analysis of our system’s performance which helps us track our progress, or just answering questions so we can make sure we understand what’s going on.”

Thanks to Opster’s products and support, the CoreView team has complete peace of mind with Elasticsearch. “Honestly, the best part is the response time. Whenever we need something form the Opster team, we just write to them on Microsoft Teams and they answer us within a few minutes,” said Lombardi. “They are always available, always ready to help.”

“Honestly, the best part is the response time. The Opster team is always available, always ready to help.”

Alessandro Lombardi | Senior System Architect at CoreView

“Opster is the complete solution we were looking for,” said Lombardi. “Our performance is constantly improving, we spend less time and less money on our deployment, and the support team is so responsive and amazing.”

The post How CoreView Optimized their Elasticsearch with Opster appeared first on Opster.

Backblaze is an American cloud storage and data backup company. They went public in 2021, and have since increased their investment in the development of their Storage Cloud platform and the B2 Cloud Storage and Computer Backup services that run on it.

Searching for help with OpenSearch 

Backblaze has been using OpenSearch ever since it launched, after switching out several other logging systems. “When we started using OpenSearch, I discovered that I had way more control over everything in the system, but there was a lot less built in for us. That’s part of why I was so happy to find Opster,” said Billy McCarthy, Senior SysAdmin at Backblaze. “I felt like I was in over my head a lot of the time, especially when the online community wasn’t really there yet and there wasn’t a lot of information out there.”

Backblaze’s primary use case is log analysis, both application logs and system logs, as well as observability. They now manage several on-prem OpenSearch clusters. “Prior to beginning to work with Opster, I was spending about 50% of my time trying to manage OpenSearch,” said McCarthy. “I was doing everything on my own and just trying to keep my head above water.”

“Opster was our first choice for managing Elasticsearch once we started experiencing issues.”

Alessandro Lombardi | Senior System Architect at CoreView

When McCarthy began looking for services to help him manage OpenSearch on-premises, he found very few options. “I couldn’t find resources, no one would even talk to us about helping us manage OpenSearch. Opster’s the only company I found offering a complete solution for OpenSearch.”

McCarthy originally looked to expand the team by hiring someone to be Backblaze’s internal OpenSearch expert, but employees with the right type of experience are hard to find. He ended up bringing on some junior team members, and engaging with the Opster team to conduct training sessions on all things OpenSearch. “It comes out cheaper in the long run.”

“By using the Opster AutoOps system and getting training for my team, I’m able to save so much time and effort that I used to spend on handling OpenSearch.”

Billy McCarthy | Senior SysAdmin at Backblaze

“At first I was just looking for on-prem tools to help us, and I came across Opster’s free Template Optimizer. I was so impressed with what Opster was offering the community. I ended up in conversation with Ziv Segal, Opster’s CEO, and realized I’d found the solution I’d been looking for. By using the Opster AutoOps system and getting training for my team, I’m able to save so much time and effort that I used to spend on handling OpenSearch.”

Opster – The complete solution for managing and optimizing OpenSearch 

Backblaze began using Opster AutoOps to optimize their system. First, they defined notification to be alerted by the system before any issues arise, to be able to completely prevent production incidents. “With AutoOps and the Opster team’s help, we completely optimized our sharding strategy and improved our slow queries and search performance,” McCarthy said. “Our overall performance has improved so much since we started working with Opster.”

“We’re so impressed with AutoOps. It’s a beautiful system, really easy to navigate and configure according to the issues that matter to us. Our whole configuration is easier now.”

The Backblaze team proceeded to start a training course provided by Opster. “One of the amazing things we’re getting out of these learning sessions is understanding the context and the bigger picture. There’s documentation out there, but it’s really hard to understand how it all comes together, what’s actually important and what isn’t. The more we learn, the easier it is for us to do our jobs the right way.”

“Opster is the only company that provides what it does. Others may offer you monitoring, or consultation, but Opster covers absolutely everything you need to successfully run your search deployment. From the set-up to the follow-through, Opster even always makes sure your team has the skills they need to get their jobs done.”

“Opster is the only company that provides what it does. Others may offer you monitoring, or consultation, but Opster covers absolutely everything you need to successfully run your search deployment.”

Billy McCarthy | Senior SysAdmin at Backblaze

The post How Backblaze Optimized and Manage OpenSearch with Opster appeared first on Opster.

Coupa is a global technology platform for Business Spend Management. Their cloud platform allows users to manage all transactions across procurement, payments, and supply chain. By analyzing large quantities of corporate transactional expense data, the platform provides users with recommendations for improved inventory management, smarter purchasing decisions and lower costs.

Looking for better ways to support Coupa’s massive growth  

As a data-driven company, Elasticsearch has been one of Coupa’s key technologies for the last 5 years. “We use Elasticsearch for both of our primary use cases: our product search and logging,” said Arpit Ghiya, Senior Lead SRE. “Before we started working with Opster, we were always looking for better ways to manage the templates, to optimize the usage of the clusters, and to handle any incidents that occurred.”

Based on anticipated growth in traffic, the Coupa team began looking for a solution to help them handle the imminent scaling. They were considering managed services for logging, various consultants and Elastic/AWS as well. Though they had worked in the past with various consultants, they were disappointed in the level of support and primarily in the fact that the support was not real-time. 

“It was just not the overall solution we were looking for,” Ghiya said. “There were a lot of factors we were considering. We wanted something that could provide us with proactive monitoring and alerting solutions, that would ensure platform stability, and would alert us to issues before they actually occurred and became problematic. However, we also wanted a solution that would help us reduce costs as we scaled.”

When searching for possible solutions, the Coupa team came across Opster’s free Elasticsearch Check-Up. “We liked the recommendations that we got, and that’s when we engaged in our official process with the Opster team and got started with the AutoOps platform.”

“Opster was our first choice for managing Elasticsearch once we started experiencing issues.”

Alessandro Lombardi | Senior System Architect at CoreView

The ultimate solution for ensuring performance & stability while reducing costs 

“For the first few months of our work with the Opster team and Opster products, our core focus was to ensure that our clusters were all stable and reliable. We found Opster’s AutoOps service to be a powerful technology that gave us alerting, analysis and resolution of incidents in real-time, within the SaaS. By working with the platform’s indications and recommendations, we improved performance a lot. We majorly reduced the number of incidents and alerts, and we continuously reviewed the cluster state and steadily optimized it,” Arpit Ghiya shared. “What we wanted was to ensure our engineers wouldn’t have to worry about platform stability at all, and we achieved that.”

“Since beginning to work with Opster, we’ve been able to reduce our hardware costs by 60% every month.”

Arpit Ghiya | SSenior Lead SRE

Aside from cluster stability and performance, the major change that occurred after beginning to work with Opster was the cost of Coupa’s Elasticsearch operation. “Since beginning to work with Opster, we’ve been able to reduce our hardware costs by 60% every month. The massive reductions in cost are still ongoing, we’re still counting.”

During this time period, Coupa’s customer base continued to increase, so not only were costs reduced from what they were before, the cost would actually have continued to grow along with the growth in data. “Honestly, Opster saved us both infrastructure costs and the human cost of our team’s time and effort.”

“Opster saved us both infrastructure costs and the human cost of our team’s time and effort.”

Arpit Ghiya | SSenior Lead SRE

Elasticsearch optimizations and performance improvement

The Coupa team has finished a major release since implementing all the changes recommended by Opster’s team and platform into production, “and the benefits are reaping in now,” said Ghiya. These changes included optimizations aimed at reducing infrastructure costs and conserving resources. After connecting to AutoOps, shard optimization was a priority: improving capacity planning and adjusting the number of primary and replica shards needed for ideal performance showed immediate results. 

By using Opster’s Template Optimizer tool, the Coupa team optimized field mappings throughout their deployment which enabled them to reduce storage, therefore reducing costs. The teams built a live dashboard with all of the info on every query running on the cluster to improve query visibility for the Coupa application team. By using this dashboard and the Search Log Analyzer, the teams were able to detect inefficient queries that could be improved and heavy queries that were causing service disruption, leading to search performance boosts. 

“Since all of these optimizations, the overall experience has been better for both our internal team and our customers. The AutoOps platform is great and we’ve had amazing support from the Opster team.”

Arpit Ghiya | SSenior Lead SRE

The Opster team also helped Coupa review internal processes on the cluster like replacing data nodes, upgrades or rolling restarts to help the cluster be more robust and stable. “There were a lot of things we weren’t using, like index lifecycle management,” said Ghiya. “The way we were managing data within the cluster or rolling over indices wasn’t standardized, which affected the cluster state. All of these things added additional costs and impacted our operation’s performance and stability.”

“Since all of these optimizations, the overall experience has been better for both our internal team and our customers. The AutoOps platform is great and we’ve had amazing support from the Opster team,” Ghiya said. “We used to be concerned about adding new functionalities or adding more data to the system, and now we don’t worry about it at all. We know we can onboard more and more because our cluster, with Opster’s optimizations, can handle it. We have nothing to worry about with Elasticsearch anymore.”

The post How Coupa Reduced Their Elasticsearch Expenses by 60% and Improved Performance  appeared first on Opster.

BMC Software helps customers run and reinvent their businesses with open, scalable, and modular solutions to complex IT problems.

From core to cloud to edge, BMC delivers the software and services that enable over 10,000 global customers, including 84% of the Forbes Global 100, to thrive in their ongoing evolution to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

Operating a brand new feature together with Opster

One of BMC’s many successful products is Control-M, a leading application and data workflow orchestration platform that is already installed for many companies around the world. 

BMC engaged with Opster to build a brand new feature for Control-M, one that would add valuable analytics for their users and assist in identifying and assessing issues. This project entailed very challenging requirements: the system needed to be able to store large amounts of data and metrics in real-time, as well as provide blazing fast dashboards on top of large collections of historical data.

The two teams worked together to build “Control-M Workflow Insights”, a new reporting tool entirely based on OpenSearch, from scratch.

The new feature includes dashboards that provide the in-depth application and data workflow observability IT teams need to continuously monitor and improve performance. Users get easy-to-understand reports with insights into how changes impact the delivery of business services over time. 

Control-M Workflow Insights is based on large amounts of data coming into OpenSearch in real-time. “It was a complex project to build, which is why we were so glad we had Opster’s technology and support,” said Nathan Amichay, BMC’s Product Development Architect. “We started with nothing, but had to incorporate the feature into a product that is already in use by many customers who would be affected. This also meant that the scale and performance required from day one of implementation were far beyond the usual level for a new feature.”

Building & Operating Control-M Workflow Insights Using Opster AutoOps

“Opster was our first choice for managing Elasticsearch once we started experiencing issues.”

Alessandro Lombardi | Senior System Architect at CoreView

After the important decisions were made, the two teams began functional testing. BMC connected their clusters to Opster’s AutoOps platform which enabled review of sharding strategy, node configuration, potential bottlenecks and more. AutoOps also allowed BMC to detect and resolve any errors that occurred. 

Once the clusters were stabilized, the teams began running performance and benchmark tests to tune and optimize performance. “This also allowed for long duration capacity planning, as one of the requirements of the project was to plan multiple years ahead and implement a scaling strategy that would function for hundreds or thousands of different deployments in the field,” Amichay said.

The benchmark tests allowed for the identification of all important issues before ever deploying on customers’ premises, simulating a more mature and data-rich system. This enabled both teams to use AutoOps to optimize and adjust for production environments before the first real installation in the field.

The enterprise subscription included training the BMC team on everything there is to know about OpenSearch and AutoOps. “These sessions were fascinating and so beneficial to the team,” said Amichay.

“Control-M Workflow Insights” successfully launched to customers

BMC successfully launched Control-M Workflow Insights to customers in October 2021 and continues to operate it with the help of Opster AutoOps. The joint efforts of Opster and BMC allowed for smooth deployment, thanks to the meticulous planning and development of every last detail. 

“Opster’s products and services were the key in delivering a successful feature to our customers.”

Nathan Amichay | BMC’s Product Development Architect

“Thanks to Opster, our new feature rolled out smoothly and successfully,” said Nathan Amichay. “Their products and services were key components in delivering a successful feature to our customers.”

Opster and BMC are working closely together on the next joint venture to plan and deploy additional new features, including advancing Control-M Workflow Insights, to continue to provide new solutions for BMC’s customers.

The post How BMC Successfully Launched a New Feature Based on OpenSearch with Opster appeared first on Opster.

Omnidots is the global market leader in construction and building vibration monitoring. As a primary supplier for the construction and infrastructure industry, Omnidots provides innovative and high quality vibration analysis equipment.

Omnidots is the only supplier in the business that offers a fully integrated and automated solution to directly carry out and analyze vibration measurements. Their application is reliant on Elasticsearch, which they have been using for the past 7 years. They connected Elasticsearch for the ingestion of large data sets from the vibration monitors, to enable effective and quick search of said vibration data.

Beginning to work with Opster

As Omnidots began to scale and enter into additional markets, they found that maintaining the same high level of performance on their Elasticsearch cluster became a challenge. “It was also extremely resource intensive,” added Lourens Rozema, Omnidots’ CTO.  

At this stage, the Omnidots team engaged with Opster to connect their environment to Opster AutoOps and receive visibility, issue resolution and real-time production support.

“Opster was our first choice for managing Elasticsearch once we started experiencing issues.”

Alessandro Lombardi | Senior System Architect at CoreView

Elasticsearch optimizations with Opster

The Opster and Omnidots teams used the insights gained from Opster AutoOps to begin optimization of the Elasticsearch environment. 

The platform detected and suggested sharding changes to reflect the most up-to-date usage and capacity. The primary and replica count was also adjusted accordingly. 

By running the Opster Template Optimizer, the team detected additional ways to improve the performance of indices by updating the template and mappings.

Omnidots’ Elasticsearch environment was suffering from occasional search delays that were interfering with their customers’ experience. By analyzing their search logs using the Opster Search Log Analyzer, the team was able to further improve the mappings definition. 

Once these optimizations were implemented, Omnidots and Opster worked together on providing detailed visibility into the searches being run against the Omnidots Elasticsearch deployment. To achieve this, Omnidots installed Opster’s Search Gateway to gain deep insights into their search performance and reduce search latency by improving the queries. The Gateway also allowed Omnidots to prevent damaging search queries from harming the relevant cluster.

“Omnidots installed Opster’s Search Gateway to gain deep insights into their search performance and reduce search latency by improving the queries. The Gateway also allowed Omnidots to prevent damaging search queries from harming the relevant cluster.”

Lourens Rozema | Omnidots’ CTO

“Opster has become a true partner, allowing us to focus on providing our customers with our core value rather than wasting our time on Elasticsearch troubles,” said Rozema.

Omnidots and Opster have been taking great strides together to advance Omnidots’ business objectives in the construction industry, which rely on quick data analysis in Elasticsearch. 

For more information on Opster’s various products and services for Elasticsearch, contact us. To get started with a demo, click here.

The post Omnidots Partners with Opster to Optimize Elasticsearch Operations appeared first on Opster.

OzTAM is the official source of television audience measurement (TAM) covering Australia’s five mainland metropolitan markets and nationally for subscription television.

OzTAM manages and markets television ratings data for total television viewing in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth across all television households and nationally for all subscription television households.

OzTam’s Elasticsearch Use Case –  Over Half a Billion Events Every Day

OzTam has been using Elasticsearch for many years to ingest events from video-on-demand services. “We now have around 700 million events going into Elasticsearch every single day,” said Adam Donnison, OzTam’s Information Technology Specialist. OzTam’s Elasticsearch deployment needed to be able to handle the load and support their business growth while maintaining peak performance. 

Elasticsearch is key to the analysis and visualization process of data on which shows are most popular, which hours most people tend to watch and other vital information that broadcasters need the most.

“Opster was our first choice for managing Elasticsearch once we started experiencing issues.”

Alessandro Lombardi | Senior System Architect at CoreView

“We’ve been using Elasticsearch since version 2 or so,” said Donnison. “We’ve had a lot of situations where we felt like we were pushing the limits of what Elasticsearch can cope with.”

“This year we were at the point of giving up on Elasticsearch,” Donnison said, explaining that the team had begun looking for alternatives.

With Opster, Elasticsearch is Easy

When trying to solve an issue in their cluster on their own, the OzTam team came across Opster’s free Elasticsearch Check-Up. “We decided to inquire further. As it turned out, it was the best thing we ever did because we saw that we were getting far better support from Opster than we were getting from Elastic’s support.”

Prior to beginning to work with Opster, Donnison said his role had unintentionally become far more focused on running Elasticsearch than on his regular responsibilities. “Before Opster, I was probably spending over 30 percent of my time just nursing Elasticsearch. Now I sometimes don’t look at stats for a week.”

With Opster’s services and products, Donnison and the OzTam team realized they could continue using Elasticsearch, without the trials and tribulations they’d been dealing with for years. “3 months ago we were looking to ditch Elasticsearch, until we started working with Opster and it gave us confidence to continue with Elasticsearch moving forward.”

“I love the way Opster works with us, the proactive advice, the technology they provide, the dashboards and especially the Search Gateway. All of those things have proven to be really, really key in being able to pinpoint what is going on in our system.”

“Before Opster, I was probably spending over 30% of my time just nursing Elasticsearch. I love the way Opster works with us, the proactive advice, the technology they provide – working with Opster gave us the confidence to continue with Elasticsearch moving forward.”

Adam Donnison | OzTam’s Information Technology Specialist

“There were all sorts of solutions that were very hard to glean from Elastic’s documentation or from their support team. The Opster team is really good at identifying issues and coming up with solutions. It’s been a revelation working with Opster, to be honest. Anybody using Elasticsearch that isn’t also using Opster has got rocks in their heads.”

Improved Elasticsearch Performance with Opster

“With Opster, I know that if I have a question about a problem, I’m going to get a straight answer and one that has thought behind it. I know that we’re going to get our problem solved,” said Donnison. Aside from ongoing support, OzTam also has periodic support calls with the Opster team. Over the last few months, OzTam has improved their cluster stability, optimized sharding and improved search visibility and optimization.

“Anybody using Elasticsearch that isn’t also using Opster has got rocks in their heads.”

Adam Donnison | OzTam’s Information Technology Specialist

For more information on Opster’s various products and services for Elasticsearch, contact us. To get started with a demo, click here.

The post How OzTam Improved their Elasticsearch Performance with Opster appeared first on Opster.

EveryMundo provides Offer Marketing Software to drive direct channel growth and customer acquisition for major travel companies worldwide. The company works with over 60 airlines worldwide ranging from major full-service carriers to LCCs, based on 6 continents and marketing in over 25 languages.

Their products increase traffic, improve conversion rates, enhance user experience, and drive brand engagement on and off the airline’s website.

Operating Elasticsearch With a Managed Service

EveryMundo operates a mission-critical Elasticsearch deployment. Their team was constantly engaged in keeping their clusters up and running, despite the fact that they were using Elastic Cloud, which was purchased to provide them with a managed service. Their days often went to time-consuming Elasticsearch tasks, such as trying to troubleshoot issues and tune their cluster performance. 

“It was a lot of back and forth with Elastic through a ticketing system,” said Jose Rafaelly, EveryMundo’s Head of System Engineering. “It’s one of those big companies where you have some sort of support, but there’s no face-to-face communication where they can help you right away, on the go unless you pay more. You open a ticket and at some point they’ll reply.”

Ultimately, Jose chose to leave Elastic Cloud because of the pricing relative to the value provided. “We were spending a lot of money on our cluster. I realized it would be more cost-effective to run the Elasticsearch clusters on our own.”

While looking for a monitoring tool to help them with their new deployment, Jose found Opster’s website. “It was a miracle. I believe it was.”

“Opster was our first choice for managing Elasticsearch once we started experiencing issues.”

Alessandro Lombardi | Senior System Architect at CoreView

Operating Elasticsearch Self-Hosted With Opster

“The first thing I did was try the free Elasticsearch Check-Up tool,” Jose said, describing the day he first discovered Opster’s website. A few hours later, he spoke with Opster’s experts and began a POC. “I realized for the same amount I paid Elastic I could hold the cluster on my end and also afford to have Opster monitoring and troubleshooting all the issues.” 

“Since signing up with Opster, we haven’t had any issues in production. Dev is like production for us, and they help us with any issues we have there. They jump on and stay with us until everything is fixed. That’s been incredibly helpful, and something I really appreciate from Opster: to have that kind of support right away, not hours later.”

After troubleshooting all of the existing issues EveryMundo was dealing with in Elasticsearch, they began to work with Opster’s tools and solutions to optimize their system, starting with their memory heap. Throughout the process, all of EveryMundo’s client information was fully protected and was not accessed by Opster’s team, as both Opster and EveryMundo highly value protecting customers’ data privacy and upholding the highest security standards.

EveryMundo used Opster’s services and products to review instance types and how much heap was being used for Elasticsearch JVM. They set up the correct memory requests and limits in Kubernetes, covering all of the recommended settings and best practices. Garbage collection was tuned specifically according to EveryMundo’s use-case. Throughout the process, the EveryMundo team ran many benchmark tests in order to validate the optimized settings. 

As part of the general data review conducted with EveryMundo, templates and mappings were optimized. EveryMundo’s benchmark tests validated a 50% improvement in search and index performance, just from the data schema tuning alone. 

“By optimizing data templates and mappings, search and indexing performance improved by 50%. Using Opster’s AutoOps Operator for Shard Optimization, search throughput performance improved by 30%.”

Jose Rafaelly | EveryMundo’s Head of System Engineering

Using Opster’s AutoOps Operator for Shard Optimization, many small indices were merged into optimized and larger shards. This process reduced the amount of shards in the cluster by hundreds and improved search throughput performance by 30%. Bottlenecks and hotspots were reduced throughout the cluster, resulting in a balanced load across all the data nodes. 

“We’ve been learning through the process as well,” Jose said. “That’s important too.”

Thanks to all of these optimizations and Opster’s ongoing tuning, “We’ve been able to not think about Elasticsearch anymore. We can focus on other aspects of our infrastructure and let Opster take over the Elasticsearch work.”

“We’ve been able to not think about Elasticsearch anymore. We can focus on other aspects of our infrastructure.”

Jose Rafaelly | EveryMundo’s Head of System Engineering

“Every meeting that we have, I thank the Opster team for all the help Opster provides. I’m very glad we started this partnership and can continue working together in the future. I believe it’s a team with a lot of experience who have made great solutions for managing Elasticsearch. Opster is very professional, and as people they’re awesome – so it’s the entire package. If we keep getting the support we’re getting right now, we’re good for years to come.”

For more information on Opster’s various products and services for Elasticsearch, contact us. To get started with a demo, click here.

The post How EveryMundo Improved Elasticsearch Performance and Optimized Resources with Opster appeared first on Opster.