
Elastic launches Logs Essentials for cost-effective cloud log analytics
Logs Essentials is positioned as a lower-priced service to provide teams with essential log ingestion, searching, visualisation, and alerting without the requirement to manage the underlying infrastructure. The solution is built on the same stateless architecture as Elastic Observability, providing the ability to scale automatically and without operational overhead while retaining high availability.
Core features
The product enables users to perform fast and precise log analytics using filters, pattern matching, alerting, rich visualisations, and ES|QL, Elastic's piped query language. According to Elastic, this feature set is designed to help SREs quickly identify and resolve issues, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of response efforts to operational incidents.
Santosh Krishnan, General Manager, Observability & Security at Elastic, commented: "SREs need a hassle-free, scale-as-you-go, high-availability logging solution that empowers them to focus entirely on operational insights, not infrastructure, without the complexity of standing up and maintaining observability tooling," Santosh Krishnan, general manager, Observability & Security at Elastic. "Logs Essentials makes it easy to get started with Elastic by offering a simple, reliable path to insights at a lower entry point."
Logs Essentials is designed for teams that require core log analytics capabilities but are not seeking to pay for more advanced features. When more comprehensive observability is required, there is an upgrade path to Elastic Observability Complete, which includes further workflows and feature sets.
Pricing and scalability
Elastic has highlighted the tier's price-optimised model, where customers pay for the data they ingest and store, rather than committing to permanent infrastructure or premium licensing. This approach aims to make log analytics accessible for organisations of varying sizes, particularly those that want to avoid fixed costs or the complexities associated with on-premises deployments.
The automatic scaling feature is managed through Elastic Cloud Serverless and is intended to maintain performance as log volume changes, especially during traffic spikes or incident investigations. The stateless design is noted as being central to enabling seamless scaling and system resilience.
Operational insights
Elastic states that Logs Essentials supports teams in accelerating root cause analysis and in obtaining deep contextual insights, as well as proactive detection of operational issues. The service is targeted to provide a "hassle-free entry point for operational insights," according to statements in the product description included in the release.
Elastic also pointed to the popularity and existing adoption of its platform in the market, citing usage by thousands of companies, including more than half of the Fortune 500.
Service availability
Logs Essentials is now available within Elastic Cloud. Registration is managed via the provider's standard channels, and customers are able to begin with a free trial before choosing to purchase the service.
The new tier joins Elastic's portfolio of solutions that integrate search, observability, and security applications, all built upon Elastic's Search AI Platform. Users can deploy the tier without infrastructure management responsibilities, and scale their deployment as needed according to log volume and analytic requirements.
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Techday NZ
19 hours ago
- Techday NZ
Elastic launches Logs Essentials for cost-effective cloud log analytics
Elastic has announced the release of Logs Essentials, a new serverless log analytics tier offered within Elastic Cloud Serverless and designed for site reliability engineers (SREs) and developers. Logs Essentials is positioned as a lower-priced service to provide teams with essential log ingestion, searching, visualisation, and alerting without the requirement to manage the underlying infrastructure. The solution is built on the same stateless architecture as Elastic Observability, providing the ability to scale automatically and without operational overhead while retaining high availability. Core features The product enables users to perform fast and precise log analytics using filters, pattern matching, alerting, rich visualisations, and ES|QL, Elastic's piped query language. According to Elastic, this feature set is designed to help SREs quickly identify and resolve issues, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of response efforts to operational incidents. Santosh Krishnan, General Manager, Observability & Security at Elastic, commented: "SREs need a hassle-free, scale-as-you-go, high-availability logging solution that empowers them to focus entirely on operational insights, not infrastructure, without the complexity of standing up and maintaining observability tooling," Santosh Krishnan, general manager, Observability & Security at Elastic. "Logs Essentials makes it easy to get started with Elastic by offering a simple, reliable path to insights at a lower entry point." Logs Essentials is designed for teams that require core log analytics capabilities but are not seeking to pay for more advanced features. When more comprehensive observability is required, there is an upgrade path to Elastic Observability Complete, which includes further workflows and feature sets. Pricing and scalability Elastic has highlighted the tier's price-optimised model, where customers pay for the data they ingest and store, rather than committing to permanent infrastructure or premium licensing. This approach aims to make log analytics accessible for organisations of varying sizes, particularly those that want to avoid fixed costs or the complexities associated with on-premises deployments. The automatic scaling feature is managed through Elastic Cloud Serverless and is intended to maintain performance as log volume changes, especially during traffic spikes or incident investigations. The stateless design is noted as being central to enabling seamless scaling and system resilience. Operational insights Elastic states that Logs Essentials supports teams in accelerating root cause analysis and in obtaining deep contextual insights, as well as proactive detection of operational issues. The service is targeted to provide a "hassle-free entry point for operational insights," according to statements in the product description included in the release. Elastic also pointed to the popularity and existing adoption of its platform in the market, citing usage by thousands of companies, including more than half of the Fortune 500. Service availability Logs Essentials is now available within Elastic Cloud. Registration is managed via the provider's standard channels, and customers are able to begin with a free trial before choosing to purchase the service. The new tier joins Elastic's portfolio of solutions that integrate search, observability, and security applications, all built upon Elastic's Search AI Platform. Users can deploy the tier without infrastructure management responsibilities, and scale their deployment as needed according to log volume and analytic requirements.

RNZ News
a day ago
- RNZ News
US arms sales surge while NZ increases defence spending
Three new US-NZ forums have recently been set up. File photo. Photo: 123rf The United States has been drawing up of a list of "priority partners" for arms transfers. RNZ has asked the government if New Zealand is on that list. The list is part of a big new US push this year to streamline defence sales. This aimed to "simultaneously strengthen the security capabilities of our allies and invigorate our own defence industrial base", US President Donald Trump said. He has signed executive orders and his administration is advancing six new laws and initiatives to free up arms trading. Three new US-NZ forums have been set up and have met, while two powerful US arms-related Congressional delegations have also visited this year. New Zealand has recently joined three frameworks that have the primary aim to expand the US military-industrial base in the Indo-Pacific. Political debate has swirled around the issue, with former PM Helen Clark on Tuesday accusing the government of "cuddling right back up again to Washington DC" over its stand on Gaza, and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon denying the coalition's position has anything to do with the US . The lines are clearer on the military side - official papers show 60 percent of the $6 billion in arms the NZ Defence Force has on order is from the US; and New Zealand has been keen to register its "recent uptick in military activities in the Indo-Pacific" with its partners. The papers also show a US-NZ meeting in April about "potential opportunities for procurement from the US". Arms sales world-wide are surging as governments respond to US pressure - and the Gaza and Ukraine wars - to increase defence spending. America's two systems of sales registered increases of 45 percent and 27 percent, for a combined half a trillion dollars of sales last year. The largest single items included $32b for fighter-jets for Israel. But its arms factories cannot keep up - Ukraine has depleted its stockpile of missiles and ammunition so much it ordered a stocktake - while trade barriers are in the way elsewhere. Trump put a Republican lawmaker in charge of a new taskforce for pulling down the barriers in March. "We operate with high lethality and some of the most technologically advanced systems ever created by man," said taskforce chair Ryan Zinke . "And yet, our closest allies get the bureaucratic shaft when they try to meet their defence needs with made-in-America equipment and systems." Zinke consulted international partners before introducing six proposals last month. The first one is the 'Streamlining Foreign Military Sales Act'. New Zealand is consulting on at least three new fronts with the Americans. Officials have had "many discussions" about the issues dating back to at least mid-2023, according to papers released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to AUT Pacific historian Dr Marco de Jong under the Official Information Act. Three new "dialogues" have been set up since mid-2024. One on space, a second on "critical and emerging technologies" - these two overlap with defence - and a third on 'Strategic and Defence Trade'. The latter dialogue took an "important first step" to "streamlining" trade at an inaugural meeting in Washington in December. The US showed "willingness... to engage on barriers", the papers revealed. Most of the papers were blanked out for security reasons, but one question was not: "What is the strategic direction that the US is taking with regard to its export control regime?" A key party is the US Directorate of Defence Trade Controls, although commercial technology is also in the mix. The papers also showed Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) disarmament and counter-proliferation experts taking a "deeper dive" into export controls. Some controls around space technology had recently changed, they said. RNZ is asking for details. Australia already increasingly has "streamlined access into the US" under recent AUKUS-related law changes . President Joe Biden was in charge when the US instigated the three new dialogue groups with New Zealand last year. Trump has reversed many Biden initiatives, but not the Pentagon's increasing push to integrate allies. The overall goal remains the same: "To serve the interests of the American people." Trump put it this way in April , when he signed the executive order to speed up arms sales and technology sharing. The order sets up the priority partners list, a track to "consolidate parallel decision-making" with allies over who gets what US arms, and a way to lower the cost of weapons, including by "improving financing options for partners". The "priority partner" list was due to be finalised around June. The NZ government has previously played down the new US-led defence initiatives it has joined. It called a regional group to boost the US military-industrial reach a "discussion forum", while US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth praised the PIPIR group for directly supporting Trump's "peace through strength" agenda. A senior NZ Defence Force manager who is part of a dialogue group reposted a Pentagon description of PIPIR as "nothing less than the emergence of a mesh based alliance industrial base" last month. The newly released MFAT papers said being invited in by the US showed trust. "New Zealand's status as a trusted partner has been recognised by the US. In late 2022, the US added New Zealand to its National Technology Industrial Base, alongside other FVEY's [Five Eyes intelligence group] members. We have heard from the US, including at senior levels, that as a close and trusted partner there should be few impediments" to more technological cooperation. When RNZ revealed that NZ had joined the National Technology Industrial Base, the government said this was a US decision and it was "not involved". Zinke's barrier-cutting taskforce was set up a month before a US Congressional delegation met the Defence and Foreign Affairs Ministers in Auckland in April 2025. The delegation's leader was Young Kim, who is on Zinke's taskforce. It came to see how the US could strengthen its "economic and security relationships", according to a briefing released to de Jong. The talks would "highlight our excellent collaboration in critical sectors such as space and defence". The US lawmakers - from foreign affairs and defence appropriation committees - also met NZ defence officials who briefed them on Defence Minister Judith Collins' new $12b defence capability plan. "This meeting is a useful opportunity to reinforce this government's approach to defence, and to highlight potential opportunities for procurement from the US. "Rep. Young Kim has recently been named as a member of a new Foreign Arms Sales task force, which aims to make it easier for US allies and partners to procure American equipment," the papers added. Another Congressional delegation that came in February had House Armed Services Committee members on it. It discussed "New Zealand's increased commitments to security in the Indo-Pacific". Another point of intersect is what the militaries want to buy, and how they want to do that. The push is towards low-cost technology, such as drones and simpler guided missiles that can be much more rapidly produced, or on software and hardware being able to be more easily transferred between partners. The US federal defence budget of $1.5 trillion has a strong emphasis on unmanned systems, long-range munitions and rapid production capabilities. On drones, Hegseth last month announced "sweeping" changes to how the Pentagon buys and fields them, partly to make up for the depleted ability to build warships quickly enough. "A hybrid fleet would put more hulls in the water by fielding relatively inexpensive large- and medium-sized unmanned maritime systems instead of more expensive surface combatants," said commentary at the US Naval Institute . The 2025 US budget aligned "funding priorities with the industrial reforms necessary to bring allied technologies to scale", Zinke's taskforce said. Collins has spoken of New Zealand's need to get strike missiles and many more military drones. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.


Techday NZ
2 days ago
- Techday NZ
Dell unveils AI Data Platform upgrades with NVIDIA & Elastic
Dell Technologies has announced enhancements to the Dell AI Data Platform, expanding its support across the full lifecycle of artificial intelligence workloads with new hardware and software collaborations. The updates to the Dell AI Data Platform aim to address the challenges enterprises face with massive, rapidly growing, and unstructured data pools. Much of this data is unsuitable for generative AI applications unless it can be properly indexed and retrieved in real time. The latest advancements are designed to streamline data ingestion, transformation, retrieval, and computing tasks within enterprise environments. Lifecycle management The Dell AI Data Platform now provides improved automation for data preparation, enabling enterprises to move more quickly from experimental phases to deployment in production environments. The architecture is anchored by specialised storage and data engines, designed to connect AI agents directly to quality enterprise data for analytics and inferencing. The platform incorporates the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference architecture, providing a validated, GPU-accelerated solution that combines storage, compute, networking, and AI software for generative AI workflows. New partnerships An important component of the update is the introduction of an unstructured data engine, the result of collaboration with Elastic. This engine offers customers advanced vector search, semantic retrieval, and hybrid keyword search capabilities, underpinned by built-in GPU acceleration for improved inferencing and analytics performance. The unstructured data engine operates alongside other data tools, including a federated SQL engine for querying structured data, a large-scale processing engine for data transformation, and fast-access AI-ready storage. The array of tools is designed to turn large, disparate datasets into actionable insights for AI applications. Server integration Supporting these software advancements are the new Dell PowerEdge R7725 and R770 servers, fitted with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. Dell claims these air-cooled servers provide improved price-to-performance for enterprise AI workloads, supporting a diverse range of use cases from data analytics and visual computing to AI inferencing and simulation. The NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPU supports up to six times the token throughput for large language model inference, offers double the capacity for engineering simulations, and can handle four times the number of concurrent users compared to the previous generation. The integration of these GPUs in a 2U server chassis is positioned to make high-density AI calculations more accessible to a wider base of enterprise users. The Dell PowerEdge R7725 will be the first 2U server platform to deliver the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, allowing organisations to deploy a unified hardware and software solution without the need for in-house architecture and testing. This is expected to enable enterprises to accelerate inferencing, achieve more responsive semantic searching, and support larger and more complex AI operations. Industry perspectives "The key to unlocking AI's full potential lies in breaking down silos and simplifying access to enterprise data," said Arthur Lewis, president, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies. "Collaborating with industry leaders like NVIDIA and Elastic to advance the Dell AI Data Platform will help organisations accelerate innovation and scale AI with confidence." Justin Boitano, Vice President of Enterprise AI at NVIDIA, added, "Enterprises worldwide need infrastructure that handles the growing scale and complexity of AI workloads. With NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPUs in new 2U Dell PowerEdge servers, organisations now have a power efficient, accelerated computing platform to power AI applications and storage on NVIDIA Blackwell." Ken Exner, Chief Product Officer at Elastic, commented, "Fast, accurate, and context-aware access to unstructured data is key to scaling enterprise AI. With Elasticsearch vector database at the heart of the Dell AI Data Platform's unstructured data engine, Elastic will bring vector search and hybrid retrieval to a turnkey architecture, enabling natural language search, real-time inferencing, and intelligent asset discovery across massive datasets. Dell's deep presence in the enterprise makes them a natural partner as we work to help customers deploy AI that's performant, precise, and production-ready." Availability The unstructured data engine for the Dell AI Data Platform is scheduled for availability later in the year. The Dell PowerEdge R7725 and R770 servers with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPUs will also become globally available in the same period.