cli

While working at Booking.com, I was looking for a solution to logging that matched the ease of use and power as Graphite did for metrics. Reluctant to bring a new technology into production, I talked to co-workers and one mentioned that they were using ElasticSearch in some front-end systems for search and disambiguation. He mentioned hearing there were a few projects using ElasticSearch for storing log data.

This began my love-hate-love relationship with ElasticSearch. I've spent the past 8 years working with ElasticSearch professionally and in my spare time. Graphite and ElasticSearch are two projects that change the game in terms of exploring your data. The countless insights I've gained into system performance, application performance, and system and network security with these tools is unparalleled. Tools like Grafana and Kibana allow you to visualize your data quickly and beautifully. As a system and security engineer, sometimes this isn't enough. I spend most of my day in a terminal and needed something to explore and pivot through the data there.

This is the first part, in a many part series about a tool I created to make ElasticSearch's powerful search interface more accessible from the terminal. This tool has been essential to nearly every incident I've investigated. It was developed with the help, patience, and amazing ideas from co-workers both at Booking.com and now at Craigslist.