In an era of explosive data growth, organizations are facing a critical challenge: how to manage, analyze, and derive value from their logs without breaking the bank. Traditional proprietary solutions like Splunk have become increasingly expensive, leaving teams searching for a more sustainable approach to observability.
The rising cost of log management
As data volumes surge, so do the licensing fees for legacy log analytics platforms. Organizations are caught in a painful cycle of escalating costs that threaten to consume IT budgets without delivering proportional value. Enter OpenSearch—an open-source alternative that’s changing the game.
Piped Processing Language: The heart of modern log analysis
For Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and DevOps teams, log analysis is more than just searching and filtering. It’s about uncovering deep insights, detecting anomalies, and maintaining system reliability. OpenSearch’s Piped Processing Language (PPL) is designed to meet these sophisticated needs.
Beyond basic search
DQL (dashboard query language) in OpenSearch can be restrictive. PPL expands those capabilities by offering the following features:
- Sequential filtering
- Advanced analytics capabilities
- More powerful data exploration with joins, lookups, and subsearch
A commitment to seamless migration
We understand that switching log analytics platforms is a challenging task. That’s why OpenSearch is making significant investments to:
- Make PPL syntax more familiar
- Add missing commands and functions
- Simplify the migration process
Enterprise-grade performance with Apache Calcite
Launched in OpenSearch 3.0, Apache Calcite represents a breakthrough in log analytics scalability. The platform can now handle enterprise-level data volumes up to 150 TB per day, ensuring performance doesn’t compromise insight.
Unifying the observability experience
If you are an SRE or part of a DevOps team, you know how fragmented the log analytics experience can be. You query your data using Discover in OpenSearch Dashboards and then move to Visualize in order to build a visualization for your dashboard or Alerting in order to build an alert. In both cases, you are using different languages resulting in a disjoined experience. Now, with the new observability experience for logs that we are building, you can query, build visualizations, and create alerts (RFC) without leaving your core PPL query experience in Discover. No more learning multiple languages depending on where you are in OpenSearch. Now, there is one language which flows throughout the log analytics experience.
Getting started
Implementing the new observability experience is straightforward. Simply update your configuration file with these key attributes in OpenSearch 3.x:
data_source.enabled: true workspace.enabled: true explore.enabled: true uiSettings: overrides: "theme:version": v9 "home:useNewHomePage": true "enhancements:enabled": true opensearch.ignoreVersionMismatch: true data.savedQueriesNewUI.enabled: true
Why OpenSearch matters
The benefits of OpenSearch extend well beyond cost reduction. They include the following advantages:
- Empowering teams with flexible, powerful analytics
- Providing enterprise-grade performance
- Maintaining an open, community-driven approach
- Delivering insights without complexity
The future of log analytics
OpenSearch is committed to expanding its log analytics capabilities through several key investments:
* Enhanced PPL functionality with new commands and functions to support advanced analytics scenarios.
* Improved visualization capabilities to help users better understand their log data.
* Integration of PPL with anomaly detection to streamline the observability workflow.
We believe in building these features together with our community. Your insights and contributions are vital to shaping the future of log analytics in OpenSearch. Join us in this journey by exploring our roadmap] and participating in discussions on the OpenSearch Observability channel in Slack. Let’s collaborate to create the next generation of log analytics solutions.
