D.6. Sematext SPM: the Swiss Army knife

Sematext has long been known as a provider of cloud-hosted centralized log management. In recent years, its product portfolio has expanded into the world of real-time performance monitoring for distributed systems, including Elasticsearch. Sematext SPM, shown in figure D.9, offers performance monitoring, querying capabilities, alerting, and anomaly detection in a cloud or on-premise offering.

Figure D.9. Website: www.sematext.com License: Commercial

SPM goes a step beyond the solutions mentioned previously by offering a rich set of alerts and notification settings for Elasticsearch and across other infrastructure you may have deployed, such as Apache Kafka, NGINX, Hadoop, MySQL, and others. Alerts can be email-based, and they can post the alert data to another web service or even integrate with other monitoring or collaboration applications, such as Atlassian HipChat or Nagios.

Still, what appeals to us most about SPM is the all-in-one performance monitoring dashboard idea, allowing users to see the big picture across every piece of their deployed architecture or simply drill down into the real-time metrics being gathered on their Elasticsearch cluster (see figure D.10). That being said, SPM isn’t free like some of the other options we discussed, but the pricing is variable depending on usage (cpu/hour) and can be found here: http://sematext.com/spm/index.html.

Figure D.10. Alerts and notifications configuration

Sematext SPM is available in the following ways:

On-premise installation

As-a-service online at www.sematext.com

This appendix covered just a small sample of the existing Elasticsearch monitoring and management solutions available today. The current batch of available and community-supported monitoring plugins can be found at www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/modules-plugins.html#knownplugins.

Although Elasticsearch offers a complete and thorough REST API, the ability to visualize live and historic data is well worth the few minutes needed to install any of the plugins discussed here.