Blogs

Developer insights and practical how-to articles from our experts to inspire and empower your search experience.

Filters

Query rewrite rules in Elasticsearch: 2.3x faster wildcard scans

A second rule makes empty-string filters 1.6x faster. It reads string lengths straight from the offset array and never touches the compressed bytes. Both rules came from the same habit of running real queries and hunting for the special case.

Parker Timmins

Backfill time series data in Elasticsearch: Load months of historical metrics through the bulk API

Elasticsearch works out the time boundaries and creates the past backing indices as the documents land, so a historical data migration runs on your normal ingest path.

Mary Gouseti

Introducing SPARKLINE in ES|QL: Spot trends at a glance

Spot trends across thousands of groups at a glance without leaving your workflow. ES|QL's new SPARKLINE function turns aggregations into trend lines. One array per row, zero effort.

Daniel Rubinstein

No more allocation delays: Decoupling snapshots from shard relocation in stateless Elasticsearch

Clusters scale out under load without waiting for a snapshot to finish, because snapshots now read straight from the object store and no longer pin shards in place.

David Turner

Avoiding and Correcting Hotspots: How Elasticsearch Serverless Balances Shards

Elasticsearch Serverless replaces the Elasticsearch node-weight based shard rebalancing algorithm with resource usage aware rebalancing that avoids index shard colocation, OOM events and write load hotspotting

Dianna Hohensee

Dashboard activity logs: Find out which Kibana dashboards get used

Kibana now logs who viewed, edited or deleted each dashboard, how long it took and what failed, so you can catch a broken dashboard before anyone reports it.

Teresa Alvarez Soler

Migrating 1,100 files to Redux Toolkit v2 without freezing the Kibana monorepo

Kibana gave Redux Toolkit v2 the default package name and pushed v1 onto an explicit alias, which inverts the usual migration order. Webpack externals, yarn resolutions and an ESLint rule keep React Redux v7 and v9 out of each other's way.

Walter Rafelsberger

Know your facts: How Elasticsearch AI Indices let agents skip the reading and keep the answer

A technical walkthrough of precomputing facts into an Elasticsearch AI Index, so agents answer from a single ES|QL query instead of reading whole documents, with fewer tokens and lower latency.

Kathleen DeRusso

Taming PUNKs: How ES|QL queries Elasticsearch fields it was never told about

In Elasticsearch 9.5, ES|QL can query unmapped fields. It reads them from _source or returns nulls, so a query keeps working when a field drops out of the mapping and you avoid a reindex that takes hours.

Alexander Spies

Three SLOs every search team needs: monitoring search latency, availability and quality with OpenTelemetry

Your OpenTelemetry search spans already carry the signals for SLOs, burn rate alerts, anomaly detection and incident response, and this post shows how to build all four in Elastic Observability.

Matthew Adams

Let the big model think, let the small model work: Splitting LLM costs in Elastic Workflows

Build an Elastic workflow that sends a data sample to a large model to propose classification labels. A human signs off, then a smaller model applies them across the full corpus.

Jeffrey Rengifo

One setting for production vector search: How vectordb_document mode tunes Elasticsearch automatically

Benchmarks across four datasets show how one index setting applies bfloat16 vector quantization, cache preloading and parallel merges to improve vector search throughput and decrease storage.

Mayya Sharipova