Logs & Search slowing you down? Simplify and accelerate with Aiven for OpenSearch

For many growing businesses, data infrastructure grows and evolves organically. This often results in teams running one technology for log analytics, like a self-managed ELK cluster, and a completely separate technology for application search. While functional, these disparate tech stacks begin to eat into the bottom line. Businesses grapple with fragmented skill sets, inconsistent security models, multiple vendors, and a constant operational tax. This model is less than ideal, as it draws expert talent away from strategic priorities and into reactive work.

Let’s take a look at how OpenSearch offers the ideal technology for both use cases, and how a single, unified data platform delivers simplicity, consistency, and cost-efficiency for both your search and logging workloads.

Part 1: Exposing the True Cost of Disparate Stacks

Running different technologies for logs and search imposes a significant operational burden on businesses. Data is fragmented, technological expertise is siloed, and operations become more complex.

The Dreaded Silo Drag

Using different technologies for logs and search creates expertise and data access silos that actively work against businesses. Knowledge workers can spend an average of 12 hours per week chasing data, resulting in thousands of dollars in lost productivity per engineer every month.

Even with Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs), correlating data across different systems requires writing code that utilizes two different SDKs, authenticates to two distinct services, and employs two distinct query and response formats.

Security and system auditing also become a drag. Any self-hosted technology, such as an ELK stack, requires in-depth expertise to secure and scale access permissions and users. Any additional vendors, even with managed security models, add to this complexity. Ensuring regulatory or industry standard compliance adds to this burden, requiring audits of two or more disparate systems and vendors.

Furthermore, support becomes siloed due to the presence of various vendors, support channels, and invoices.

Day to Day Operations with Two Stacks (or more)

Operating two different data stacks on a day-to-day basis creates operational quicksand. Correlating events, such as a user's slow search and a backend error, becomes a slow, manual process that's often impossible to perform in real-time. This is compounded by the need for expertise in two different technologies, each with its own architecture, failure modes, and maintenance procedures. The management overhead doubles: double the alert types, dashboarding tools, and potential points of failure. This leads to alert fatigue, where critical incidents get missed. At the same time, managing access and compliance across two distinct platforms becomes a security nightmare.

Why This Problem Hits Hardest for Growing Businesses

These challenges inflict acute pain on SMBs. Unlike large enterprises, they prioritize lean teams, strict budgets, and cannot justify essential talent bogged down managing two complex and dissimilar technologies. Every hour an engineer spends wrestling with a foreign query language is an hour not spent building features that win customers.

The ultimate consequence is strategic stagnation, as leaders get trapped on an operational hamster wheel of daily firefighting. This problem is often exacerbated by the hidden costs of "free" open-source software. A self-managed stack seems cost-effective initially, but the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) spirals when factoring in engineering time for setup, maintenance, and scaling, easily costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Part 2: Standardize and Simplify with OpenSearch on any Cloud

The path forward to escape the chaos is standardizing on a single, powerful engine for both log and search workloads. OpenSearch is the ideal technology to serve as the foundation for both your search and log analytics needs, managed seamlessly on a unified platform.

Why Standardize on OpenSearch?

OpenSearch is a community-driven, open-source search and analytics suite designed to excel in both domains. By standardizing on it, your team only needs to learn one set of tools, one query language, and one API. It excels at both sophisticated search (with features like relevance tuning and vector search) and high-volume log analytics (with powerful aggregations and anomaly detection). This eliminates the cognitive overhead and skills fragmentation of supporting two different data technologies.

From Correlation to Causation on a Unified Platform

Even with data in separate clusters, a standardized platform makes finding insights dramatically easier by giving your teams a common language.

Consider diagnosing an e-commerce experience:

• The Disparate World: The search tool logs a slow query. A separate ELK stack logs a CPU spike. Teams must use different tools and query languages to investigate, slowing down the entire process.

• With Aiven: Your application search cluster and your log analytics cluster are both powered by Aiven for OpenSearch. A developer investigating the issue uses the same OpenSearch query language to query both clusters for a common trace_id. They can instantly pull the user's query from the search cluster and the performance logs from the log analytics cluster. Because both use the same technology and API, correlating the data is vastly simplified. The path to a rapid fix is clear and direct.

This standardization creates a powerful efficiency flywheel. Your teams become experts in one powerful tool, enabling them to resolve issues more quickly across the entire business.

Part 3: Accelerate with a single managed platform

Standardizing on OpenSearch is often the optimal technical decision for logs and search. The critical business question is how to implement it. A managed platform like Aiven provides the essential acceleration layer, acting as a unified control plane for all your OpenSearch needs.

One Platform, Two Workloads

With Aiven, you provision two optimized OpenSearch clusters: one for logs and one for search, through a single, consistent interface. Aiven absorbs the full operational load for both, backed by a financially guaranteed 99.99% uptime SLA.

This operational consistency is how you slay the dragon of complexity. You get the benefits of workload isolation without any management fragmentation.

Designed for Business Velocity

Aiven for OpenSearch is architected to accelerate your business:

• Multi-Cloud Freedom: Run your log and search clusters on AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure, all managed from one place.
• Unified Security: Get a secure-by-default environment with end-to-end encryption applied consistently to both workloads.
• Simplified Scaling: Aiven's architecture removes the guesswork. When either cluster needs more capacity, you simply upgrade your Aiven plan.
• Expert Support Team: Gain 24/7/365 access to a single team of open-source experts for both your use cases.

Aiven transforms an unpredictable liability into a strategic investment in business acceleration.

Stop Juggling, Start Accelerating

Managing disparate stacks for logs and search is a silent productivity killer. It creates a drag of complexity and hidden costs that hold your business back. Break free, empower your teams, and standardize on a single technology, managing it through Aiven’s unified platform.

OpenSearch provides a powerful, proven open-source engine for search and logs. Aiven for OpenSearch is the accelerator that makes this strategy a reality, removing the immense operational burden of managing infrastructure. It enables you to harness the power of standardization with the speed, security, and cost predictability that growing businesses demand. Stop juggling technologies and start building your future.

Ready to eliminate complexity? Start your free trial of Aiven for OpenSearch today and deploy a cluster in minutes.

Want to see how this applies to your specific use case? Book a personalized demo with one of our open-source experts.