Sematext Blog
sematext.com · Company blog · on HN since 2010
Sematext, a monitoring and logging company, writes about Elasticsearch, Solr, Logstash, Docker monitoring, and eBPF.
What HN saysHN commenters link it for Elasticsearch and Solr comparisons, X-Pack alternatives, and search trend data, especially in discussions of Elasticsearch licensing and security.
37HN people shared it
13linked it in comments
89stories submitted
257story points
3 years agolast shared
2010people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Lucandra: A Cassandra-based Lucene backend3 people · 3 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 2Using EBPF from Go for Fun and Profit2 people · 11 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 35 Logstash Alternatives2 people · 10 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 4How to instrument userspace processes with uprobes and eBPF2 people · 4 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 5Scaling Elasticsearch by Cleaning the Cluster State2 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 6Docker Container Monitoring and Management Challenges2 people · 3 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 7Solr vs. ElasticSearch2 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 8Top Elasticsearch Metrics to Watch2 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 9Monitoring ClickHouse with Sematext2 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 10X pack alternatives2 people · first shared 2018
- 11Logsene2 people · first shared 2017
- 12EC2 Neighbour Caught Stealing CPU1 people · 17 points · first shared 2013 · 9 comments on HN
- 13Open Distro for Elasticsearch Review1 people · 14 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 14What Is Real User Monitoring1 people · 10 points · first shared 2019 · 2 comments on HN
- 15Now Open Source: Sematext Monitoring Agent1 people · 7 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
tardyp · 2021-01-19
So what happens with https://sematext.com/ ? Outside of AWS, they use open-distro and do compete with elastic.co. Will they just go out of business by not being able to upgrade elastic?
otisg · 2019-07-19
That's interesting to hear. Would love to read about how Vespa compares to Solr and ES.
This may be of interest to you: https://sematext.com/opensee/report/project/trend?q=ElasticSearch,Solr…
Would you happen to know how Vespa compares to ES in terms of memory or CPU footprint? Have you done apples to apples comparison by any chance?
busterarm · 2018-09-06
LMGTFY, https://sematext.com/blog/x-pack-alternatives/
Can't recommend Sentinl & SearchGuard enough.
softwaredoug · 2022-08-25
This is a good opportunity to update my search reading list.
Books
* Lucene in Action - A bit out of date, but it has a lot of the core concepts of Lucene. 10 years ago, this was the go-to book even if you’re working with Solr or Elasticsearch, to understand the core data structures
* Relevant Search (my book) - Introduction to optimizing the relevance of full text search engines. Getting a bit old now, but still relevant for classic search engines.
* AI Powered Search (disclaimer - I contributed) - Author Trey Grainger is brilliant, and has been a long-time colleague of mine. He managed the search team at Careerbuilder (where we did some work together). This is in some ways his perspective on how machine learning and search work together.
* Elasticsearch The Definitive Guide - online free, very comprehensive, book from Elastic
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Blogs
* OpenSource Connections (my old company) Blog (http://o19s.com/blog) - lots of meaty search and relevance info
* Query Understanding (https://queryunderstanding.com/) - Daniel Tunkenlang is a long term very smart search person. Has worked at Google, etc
* James Rubenstein’s Blog (https://jamesrubinstein.medium.com/) - I worked closely with James at LexisNexis. He has helped work on search and search evaluation at Ebay, Pinterest, LexisNexis, and Apple
* Sematext (https://sematext.com/blog/) - Sematext are probably best known for being really in the weeds search engine engineers, a fair amount of scaling, etc. But some…
nkoothrappahli · 2018-03-02
If you look for real FOSS ES security i recommend Search Guard
https://github.com/floragunncom/search-guard . This is a ASL2 licensed repo which provide all kinds of basic security for Elasticsearch including SSL/TLS. So the content in this repo are real fully "open source".
Then there is a second non-FOSS repository https://github.com/floragunncom/search-guard-enterprise-modules which contains all the enterprise/advanced stuff. The code is open but not "open source".
So FOSS and and non-FOSS/proprietary are well separated. I don't understand why elastic mix and merge FOSS and non-FOSS code in the same repo with a weird mixed license applicable for special folders. This all makes no sense to me.
And there are several other FOSS projects which provide x-pack like functionalities described here https://sematext.com/blog/x-pack-alternatives/ like elastalert for alerting or sentinl for reporting.
If one is really comitted and addicted to FOSS then i believe its better to go with the FOSS x-pack alternatives and support and contribute to them.
Just my 2c.
avisk · 2020-01-07
At Sematext we replaced our HBase based metrics datastore with Clickhouse. We are happy with the performance gain and flexibility. We also added support for Clickhouse monitoring - https://sematext.com/blog/clickhouse-monitoring-sematext/
TrickyRick · 2019-08-29
https://sematext.com/cloud/ Sematext Cloud has been working well for me in a relatively small startup (Couple of thousands active users). Cheap solution and easy to get started.
set321 · 2017-01-18
ES is not really a database :) most databases have some authentication features out of the box ... but true: for those kids who don't know how to block a port, configure nginx proxies etc.: https://sematext.com/blog/2017/01/18/elasticsearch-security-authentica…
The most valuable part is about backups for ES indices - this could save you some bitcoins ;)
jkestelyn · 2016-09-01
Really good write-up (about a year old) on precisely that subject, here:
https://sematext.com/blog/2015/01/30/solr-elasticsearch-comparison/
radu0gheorghe · 2015-04-24
They are both reliable and they both have Elasticsearch outputs (recipe for rsyslog+Elasticsearch+Kibana here: http://blog.sematext.com/2013/07/01/recipe-rsyslog-elasticsearch-kiban… I would stick with rsyslog if you only need to send syslog to Elasticsearch (maybe upgrade to a recent version, the ones from most distros are ancient). Logstash is more flexible and easy to use, so if I have something that rsyslog can't do or it's too messy, I would replace it with Logstash, or just install Logstash alongside rsyslog (normally, rsyslog is very light)
angrymouse · 2014-03-21
This is comprehensive look at the two from an author of 2 ES books and 1 Solr book. http://blog.sematext.com/2012/08/23/solr-vs-elasticsearch-part-1-overv…
Chance some ES stuff might be a touch out of date as Elasticsearch has evolved a lot since this was written.
jbellis · 2010-03-18
For production ready, scalable FTS, you might be interested in Lucandra: http://github.com/tjake/Lucandra, which powers the http://sparse.ly/ twitter search site.
Higher level overview of Lucandra: http://blog.sematext.com/2010/02/09/lucandra-a-cassandra-based-lucene-…
snisarenko · 2020-04-14
Hi snewman,
I am currently using logdna as my splunk alternative, but it's not very good.
Why should I try scalyr next, over the other alternatives ?
My main constraint is the solution should be at least half as good as splunk, and cost less than $50 a month (I generate less than 1G a day).
Your pricing seems to be reasonable. But how do you compare to splunk on features ?
Here are the other tools I am considering trying
https://www.humio.com/
https://www.sumologic.com/
https://sematext.com/logsene/
https://www.datadoghq.com/log-management/
https://logz.io/pricing/
https://www.chaossearch.io/
https://www.papertrail.com/
https://www.loggly.com/
https://www.graylog.org/products/enterprise