2 days ago
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.
