Using ELK to analyse data can help you get insights into your business that you may never have otherwise stumbled upon. The data from ELK not only helps to notify you of things that go wrong, but its real-time data can also help you provide a better user experience for your customers. Here, we look at two businesses that used the powerful real-time data of Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana 4 to maximise their potential.

The Guardian

Working in the news industry means moving fast in order to get stories out there as soon as they happen. It also means that readers move quickly too; the Guardian sees large amounts of traffic within a very short amount of time, every time a new article is published. As a result of this, real-time data is essential to their success because it allows them to continuously improve in real-time too, and expose the right content to the right audiences at the right time, without a four hour lag that a great deal of analytics software has.

Elasticsearch has also allowed the Guardian to provide real-time data to those who can make the most of it: the journalists. By empowering the journalists to explore how their content performs, it helps them to consistently improve their work in order to maximise engagement with their readers.

SoundCloud

Social sound platform SoundCloud also found that real-time data was critical for their business. During a redesign of their site, the company overhauled their search infrastructure and realised that it was crucial for them to provide the most relevant results possible to their readers. They aimed to do this by providing the user with search suggestions to allow them to jump to sounds, groups, people and interests within seconds.

However, they needed real-time data in order to do this most effectively. For example, if a user downloads music, they want to be able to find it via the search function almost immediately; real-time data is therefore crucial in order to fulfil this need. SoundCloud found that Elasticsearch offered them the most powerful real-time data that would provide their users with a truly valuable search function.