Fix slow, unstable, and expensive Elasticsearch systems.

NosqlRevolution has spent 12+ years rescuing Elasticsearch and OpenSearch clusters that are sharded into oblivion, mapped like SQL tables, brought to their knees by one bad aggregation, or bleeding money in observability spend. If any of that sounds like your week, keep reading.

Over 12 Years of Production Experience

Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Elastic Observability, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Fluent Bit, and OpenTelemetry

Performance Rescue Schema & Mapping Repair Cluster Stability Observability Cost Control

Representative consulting outcomes

  • 96% duplicate data reduction
  • 50% Elastic Cloud cost reduction
  • 50% lower search latency
  • 0 downtime major upgrades
  • 24 mo. without unplanned outages

Problems We Fix

Slow search and aggregations

Queries timing out, dashboards crawling, exports pinning the cluster, and adding nodes hasn't helped. It rarely does — the shape of the work is usually the problem.

Indexing and ingestion bottlenecks

Kafka, Beats, Fluent Bit, or Logstash are backing up and no one can point to where the pressure actually starts. We trace it end-to-end and tell you.

Bad schema, mappings, and templates

Elasticsearch isn't a SQL database. Shards aren't tables, indexes aren't free, and dynamic mapping drift compounds every week you ignore it.

Cluster instability

Heap pressure, GC stalls, tripped circuit breakers, allocation failures, recovery storms, recurring yellow or red. We have debugged all of these in production. None of them are mysterious once you know where to look.

Observability cost growth

Log volume up and to the right, high-cardinality fields, duplicate telemetry, retention nobody owns, and three overlapping tools billing you for the same data.

Migration and upgrade risk

Elastic Cloud moves, self-managed to OpenSearch, major version jumps, blue-green cutovers. We have done these without downtime — yours can go the same way.

Solution Areas

Elasticsearch & OpenSearch Rescue

We dig into slow, unstable, or expensive clusters and separate symptoms from structural causes: topology, shards, heap, recovery behavior, mappings, and the shape of the workload itself.

Query & Index Performance

Cut search latency, aggregation pressure, query fan-out, export bottlenecks, and indexing lag — without throwing more hardware at the problem.

Schema, Mapping & Data Modeling

Fix mapping debt, template drift, dynamic field explosions, oversharding, SQL-shaped data models, and index designs that don't match how the data actually gets queried.

Observability Architecture

Set practical boundaries across logs, metrics, and traces — Elastic Observability, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry — so you stop paying three vendors for the same signal.

Cost Control & Retention

Cut duplicate logs, high-cardinality fields, useless ingestion, overlong retention, wrong storage tiers, and observability spend that nobody owns.

Migration, Upgrade & Cloud Modernization

Plan Elastic Cloud moves, OpenSearch assessments, version jumps, blue-green cutovers, reindexing, validation, and rollback. We have done a lot of these without causing an outage.

Common Failure Patterns

Top Elasticsearch & OpenSearch Mistakes

  1. Treating Elasticsearch like a SQL database. It isn't one. It never will be.
  2. Creating shards and indexes like they're free. They aren't.
  3. Letting dynamic mappings and templates grow with no one owning them.
  4. Writing expensive queries, aggregations, and pagination patterns without ever measuring fan-out.
  5. Adding nodes before fixing data modeling, retention, and the shape of the queries.

Top Observability Misses

  1. Treating logs, metrics, and traces as interchangeable. They aren't.
  2. Sending high-cardinality and duplicate telemetry everywhere "just in case".
  3. Building dashboards nobody actually opens during an incident.
  4. Alerting on symptoms with no owner and no runbook.
  5. Running overlapping Elastic, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, and cloud-native stacks with no cost boundary.

Start With The Problem

Tell us what's slow, unstable, expensive, or hard to explain. We'll help you spot the likely failure mode and the right first move.

Or email us directly at cbrown@nosqlrevolution.com