Observability is a system design problem, not a dashboard problem. Decide what belongs in logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and long-term storage before cardinality and cost get away from you. After is much harder.
We help teams figure out where Elastic, OpenSearch, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry, and cloud-native telemetry actually fit, where they overlap, and where they're generating noise instead of signal. Most stacks we walk into have at least one tool that could be turned off tomorrow.
Top Observability Misses
- Treating logs, metrics, and traces as interchangeable.
- Sending high-cardinality and duplicate telemetry everywhere.
- Keeping every log forever because nobody owns retention decisions.
- Building dashboards that look useful but do not help during incidents.
- Running Elastic, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, and cloud-native tooling with no clear boundary.
What Good Looks Like
- Logs answer "what happened" with enough context to debug.
- Metrics answer "is the system healthy" with low cost and clear ownership.
- Traces show request flow without capturing every low-value span forever.
- Alerts page people only when there is a real action to take.
- Retention, sampling, filtering, and storage tiers are explicit architectural choices.
What We Work On
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Monitor your applications in real-time with Elastic APM to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize user experience:
- APM agent installation and configuration for multiple languages (Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Go, Ruby, PHP)
- Distributed tracing setup for microservices architectures
- Transaction performance analysis and optimization
- Error tracking and exception monitoring
- Service map visualization and dependency analysis
- Custom metrics and business transaction tracking
- APM data retention and lifecycle management
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
Understand how real users experience your web applications with Elastic RUM:
- RUM agent integration for JavaScript applications
- Page load performance monitoring
- User journey tracking and analysis
- Core Web Vitals monitoring (LCP, FID, CLS)
- Geographic performance analysis
- Browser and device performance insights
- Error tracking and user impact analysis
Centralized Logging & Log Analysis
Aggregate, parse, and analyze logs from all your systems in one place:
- Logstash pipeline design and optimization
- Beats integration (Filebeat, Metricbeat, Heartbeat, etc.)
- Log parsing and field extraction
- Log aggregation from containers and Kubernetes
- Structured logging best practices
- Log retention and lifecycle policies
- Security event logging and analysis
- Compliance logging requirements
- Log analysis patterns and anomaly detection
- Correlation across multiple log sources
- Real-time log streaming and search
- Log-based security monitoring (SIEM integration)
Infrastructure & System Metrics
Monitor your infrastructure health and performance:
- Metricbeat configuration for system metrics
- Cloud provider metrics integration (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Container and Kubernetes metrics
- Database performance metrics
- Network monitoring and analysis
- Custom metrics collection and visualization
- Prometheus metrics integration
- Time series data optimization
- Grafana dashboard architecture and Prometheus query review
Filebeat & Log Collection
Efficient log collection with Filebeat from diverse sources:
- Filebeat installation and configuration
- Log file monitoring and tailing
- Docker and container log collection
- Kubernetes log collection with Filebeat DaemonSet
- Syslog and network log collection
- Filebeat modules (Apache, Nginx, MySQL, etc.)
- Multiline log handling and parsing
- Filebeat output configuration (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kafka)
- Filebeat performance tuning and resource optimization
- Centralized Filebeat management with Fleet
Metricbeat & Metrics Collection
Comprehensive metrics collection with Metricbeat:
- Metricbeat installation and module configuration
- System metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network)
- Application metrics collection
- Cloud metrics (AWS, Azure, GCP modules)
- Kubernetes and container metrics
- Database metrics (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc.)
- Message queue metrics (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.)
- Web server metrics (Apache, Nginx, etc.)
- Custom metric collection and aggregation
- Metricbeat performance and resource management
Fluent Bit Integration
Integrate Fluent Bit for lightweight, high-performance log processing:
- Fluent Bit installation and configuration
- Input plugins for log collection
- Filter plugins for log parsing and transformation
- Output plugins for Elasticsearch integration
- Kubernetes Fluent Bit DaemonSet deployment
- Docker log driver configuration
- Performance optimization and resource usage
- Fluent Bit vs Logstash comparison and selection
- Multi-output configurations
- Cost-aware filtering before logs reach Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Datadog, or long-term storage
OpenTelemetry (OTEL) Integration
Integrate OpenTelemetry for vendor-neutral observability:
- OpenTelemetry Collector setup and configuration
- OTEL trace and metric collection
- Elasticsearch OTEL exporter configuration
- OTEL instrumentation for applications
- OTEL to Elastic APM integration
- Multi-vendor observability data correlation
- OTEL data transformation and enrichment
- OTEL Collector deployment patterns
Datadog, Prometheus & Grafana Boundaries
Clarify which observability tools should own which jobs so cost and complexity do not compound:
- Datadog cost and cardinality review
- Prometheus metric naming, retention, and alerting review
- Grafana dashboard consolidation and signal/noise review
- Elastic vs Datadog vs Prometheus source-of-truth decisions
- Duplicate telemetry detection across commercial and open-source tools
- Migration and consolidation plans that preserve incident visibility
Elastic Fleet & Agent Management
Centralized management of Beats and Elastic Agents with Fleet:
- Fleet Server setup and configuration
- Elastic Agent installation and enrollment
- Policy management and agent configuration
- Centralized agent updates and versioning
- Agent monitoring and health checks
- Integration packages and custom integrations
- Multi-tenant Fleet configurations
- Agent security and access control
- Fleet API automation and CI/CD integration
Intelligent Alerting & Notifications
Set up proactive alerting to catch issues before they impact users:
- Watcher and Alerting rule design
- Threshold-based and anomaly detection alerts
- Multi-channel alerting (email, Slack, PagerDuty, webhooks, Microsoft Teams)
- Alert fatigue reduction strategies
- Alert correlation and grouping
- Runbook integration and automated responses
- On-call rotation and escalation policies
- Condition-based alerting (query, threshold, anomaly, ML)
- Alert action templates and customization
- Alert testing and validation
- Alert history and audit trails
- Integration with external incident management systems
Dashboards & Visualization
Create actionable dashboards and visualizations:
- Kibana dashboard design and development
- Custom visualizations and Lens charts
- Executive and operational dashboards
- Real-time monitoring views
- Historical trend analysis
- Dashboard sharing and access control
- APM dashboards and service maps
- Infrastructure monitoring dashboards
- Log analysis dashboards and saved searches
- Custom visualization plugins
- Dashboard embedding and iframe integration
- Dashboard performance optimization
- Time-based and dynamic dashboard filters
Observability Stack Architecture
Design and implement scalable observability infrastructure:
- Elasticsearch cluster sizing for observability workloads
- Hot-warm-cold architecture for log retention
- Index lifecycle management (ILM) for observability data
- Data tiering and cost optimization
- High availability and disaster recovery
- Multi-cluster setups for global deployments
Why Work With Us
- 12+ years on real stacks: We have built observability for startups, mid-stage, and Fortune 500 — same principles, different scale.
- End-to-end: Beats, Logstash, Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Kibana, Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog — we know where each one earns its keep and where it doesn't.
- Cost is a design constraint: We treat retention, cardinality, and tool overlap as architecture decisions, not finance problems to "address later."
- Operational sanity over best practice cosplay: What we recommend is what we have watched survive production.
- Your team owns the result: We document, walk through, and hand off. No vendor lock-in to our brains.
- Plays nice with what you have: We integrate; we don't rip and replace just because it's easier for us.
Common Use Cases We Work On
Application Monitoring
Track application performance, errors, and user experience across your entire stack.
Security Monitoring
Detect security threats and anomalies through log analysis and behavioral monitoring.
Infrastructure Monitoring
Monitor servers, containers, cloud resources, and network performance.
Business Analytics
Transform logs and metrics into business insights and KPIs.