Observability bills can get out of control with Elasticsearch. But no need to rebuild ELK, just replace the expensive part (Elasticsearch) with something cheaper and faster, like VeloDB(powered by Apache Doris
https://doris.apache.org/) 😉
💡 Results of moving from Elasticsearch to VeloDB:
- 80% lower observability cost
- 2x faster searches
- 10x faster aggregations
Best part? Your Logstash and Kibana pipeline stays the same, and swapping out Elasticsearch with VeloDB is an easy drop-in. We ran a demo for Elasticsearch to VeloDB migration, it took less than 10 mins, thanks to these two plugins below:
1️⃣ Doris Output Plugin (Logstash → VeloDB)
- Logstash keeps doing Logstash things.
- Same filters, same pipelines, same parsing.
- You just point the output to VeloDB and Stream Load handles the ingestion.
2️⃣ es2doris Proxy (Kibana → VeloDB)
- Kibana thinks it’s talking to Elasticsearch.
- It sends DSL → proxy converts it to SQL → VeloDB returns results → proxy formats them like Elasticsearch.
- Discover, dashboards, alerts, all work stay the same.
How VeloDB solves the Elasticsearch problem:
1️⃣ Columnar storage with high compression
2️⃣ Built-in inverted index for fast keyword search in log
3️⃣ Faster scan + aggregation engine
4️⃣ Much lower CPU and disk footprint
If you’re exploring Elasticsearch alternatives or planning infra budgets, this is worth a look.