Re:Migrating from Google Analytics
by mywittyname on Thursday January 03, 2019 @10:02AM
(#18815564)
I do both: use ELK for deep dive on analytics and have a traditional data warehouse for SQL.
Elastic is really good for data exploration. Kibana's discovery page makes it trivial to start diving into your events and gain insights. This is most valuable for large, complex applications where you don't necessarily control the analytics tagging (thus devs can create new tags willy-nilly). It's also easier for non-technical users to get into, since there don't need any sort of SQL experience to build reports.
Elastic is really bad at performing aggregations. You can do it, but they are incredibly memory-intensive, and using them puts the cluster at risk of failure due to out of memory exceptions. It doesn't take many concurrent users for this to be an issue.
Traditional data warehouses are still the best place to get counts though. Assuming your users can write SQL, they can get everything they would want and it will be reliable. Newer databases support JSON structures, so you can even host arbitrary-sized dynamic event data in them like you can with Elastic.
Elastic is really good for data exploration. Kibana's discovery page makes it trivial to start diving into your events and gain insights. This is most valuable for large, complex applications where you don't necessarily control the analytics tagging (thus devs can create new tags willy-nilly). It's also easier for non-technical users to get into, since there don't need any sort of SQL experience to build reports.
Elastic is really bad at performing aggregations. You can do it, but they are incredibly memory-intensive, and using them puts the cluster at risk of failure due to out of memory exceptions. It doesn't take many concurrent users for this to be an issue.
Traditional data warehouses are still the best place to get counts though. Assuming your users can write SQL, they can get everything they would want and it will be reliable. Newer databases support JSON structures, so you can even host arbitrary-sized dynamic event data in them like you can with Elastic.