Solutions and use cases
New to Elastic? Refer to Elastic Fundamentals to understand the Elastic Stack, its components, and your deployment options.
Elastic helps you build applications for three main use cases: search, observability, and security. You can work directly with platform capabilities through APIs, use pre-built solutions with integrated UIs, or combine both approaches.
Use the following table to choose a solution or project type when you need solution UIs or a dedicated Elastic Cloud Serverless project type. Core Elasticsearch search features that apply across deployment types are covered in Search use case.
| Your use case | What to use | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Building search-powered applications | 1. Elasticsearch solution 2. Elasticsearch Vector Database |
1. Additional UI tools that complement the core search features 2. Dedicated Elastic Cloud Serverless project type for AI-powered retrieval (RAG, recommendations, semantic and hybrid search) with vector-tuned defaults |
| Monitoring applications or infrastructure | Observability solution | Monitor and troubleshoot with logs, metrics, and traces |
| Protecting against threats | Security solution | Detect and respond to security threats |
Not sure which to choose? Start with the Elasticsearch solution for general-purpose search and analytics if you don't need the additional features of Elastic Observability, Elastic Security, or the preconfigured defaults of Elasticsearch Vector Database.
- On Elastic Cloud Serverless, select a solution as your project type when creating a project.
- On Elastic Cloud Hosted, ECE, ECK, and self-managed clusters, select a default solution view when creating a deployment, or configure per space.