Expanding Vision: OpenSearch Dashboards Advance Open Source Observability

From the moment Elastic announced plans to abandon a pure open source license for its Elasticsearch engine and Kibana dashboards in early 2021, there’s been a massive effort underway to create clear alternatives for the global community of active users.

Logz.io has been an outspoken advocate and contributor to this work – fully embracing it as part of our product roadmap to best serve the needs of our customers, and preserve our long-term commitment to open source observability. Most notably, this has been evident in our work with OpenSearch, a community-driven search and analytics suite spearheaded by AWS, in which we’ve been a core participant.

Since OpenSearch attained GA status just under a year ago, we’ve been steadily introducing related capabilities as they reach maturity, starting with the move to swap it in as our backend database. Now, we’re thrilled to announce that we are ready to take the next big step forward in this journey, moving to adopt OpenSearch Dashboards as the primary visual interface for our platform, replacing Kibana. 

Much like our move to an OpenSearch backend, this strategy is aimed at enabling users of our platform to appreciate the most innovative capabilities available on the market – combining the power of open source with our own unique features integrated into the suite, delivered as a highly reliable and scalable SaaS solution.

For users who have come to know and love our products with Kibana as a primary user interface, there’s no cause for concern – OpenSearch Dashboards offer a very familiar look and feel, at first you might hardly notice the difference beyond the change in logo. 

That said, the immediate and longer-term potential for continued innovation using OpenSearch is very real, as Dashboards will also serve as a conduit for many of the OpenSearch plugins being created across the community and within Logz.io – including observability, alerting, anomaly detection, and more.

As AWS Frontend Engineer Ashwin P. Chandran wrote on the OpenSearch blog earlier this year, this growing ecosystem of plugins represents a powerful extension of the project’s future. 

“Plugins are a way to extend and customize the core functionality of OpenSearch Dashboards. They do not need to be a part of the Dashboards repository, though many are! They makeup some of the core applications and services within it,” Chandran noted.

At Logz.io we know that this approach will not only enable us to continue to expand the capabilities of our products in unique ways, but also allow customers to create their own extensions – something we see numerous organizations doing all the time to further amplify the value of working with these crucial open source components to support their own unique requirements.

For our part, in addition to building-related features for primary dashboard functions such as search, we’re also working on a number of product enhancements that bring our patented machine learning capabilities to bear within the context of the OpenSearch Dashboards interface.

As our CEO and Co-Founder Tomer Levy noted in his blog announcing our initial participation in OpenSearch, Logz.io remains staunchly committed to the idea that a community-driven, open-source approach will be the best enabler for practitioners’ success in using these core monitoring and observability tools, both today and down the road. 

If you haven’t yet given our solutions a try for yourself you can always sign-up here for a free trial. For more information on OpenSearch you can always visit the project homepage, or check out this handy FAQ.

As always, we’d love to hear from you if you have related thoughts or feedback, or reach out if you want to get involved in the OpenSearch project!