DevOps Dictionary

Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine that indexes data so it can be queried quickly at scale. It’s commonly used to power full-text search, log and metrics exploration, and near real-time dashboards by turning incoming documents (often JSON) into an “inverted index,” a structure optimized for finding terms and filtering results. Data is split into shards and replicated across multiple nodes, which allows Elasticsearch to parallelize queries, stay available during failures, and scale out by adding capacity.

With Elasticsearch, teams can search and aggregate large volumes of operational or business data in milliseconds to seconds; without it, they often rely on slower database queries or batch jobs, making troubleshooting, alert investigation, and user-facing search less responsive and harder to scale. This gap exists because traditional databases optimize for transactions, while Elasticsearch is built for read-heavy search and aggregation over indexed data.