Company
Date Published
Author
Roi Ravhon
Word count
879
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Centralized logging with the ELK Stack offers powerful capabilities but can be challenging due to potential system crashes from certain operations. To prevent these issues, it is crucial to follow best practices such as avoiding leading wildcard searches on large datasets, which can stall the system, and ensuring that term aggregation is not performed on analyzed fields to prevent excessive memory usage. Cardinality aggregation should be used cautiously due to its potential to halt Elasticsearch when dealing with fields of high cardinality. Frequent mapping changes can also disrupt Elasticsearch indexing, so it's important to maintain stable document structures. Additionally, advanced settings in Kibana should be adjusted carefully, as they can cause the browser to freeze. Logz.io has implemented safeguards to prevent these issues in its ELK cloud service, but those managing their own deployments should be vigilant about these potential pitfalls.