Is the ELK Stack Still Relevant in Today’s Tech Landscape?

The ELK stack is still pretty popular, but a lot of places are shifting towards managed Kubernetes from cloud providers, which integrate with their own logging solutions. If you want more advanced metrics and tracing, check out OpenTelemetry—it's gaining a lot of traction and can send data to several backends, including Elasticsearch.

We've switched away from the ELK stack ourselves because of the costs involved—over a quarter-million a year for hosting and licenses! Now we use OpenTelemetry with Grafana, which only costs us about $5k annually and meets our needs better, especially for multiple teams.

ELK is still relevant but has faced challenges. A few years back, Elasticsearch shifted its licensing, which created some friction with users. Though they changed back, many are moving towards tools like ClickHouse or Loki, particularly large enterprises that need scale. Learning ELK is still beneficial—it's just that new projects might lean towards alternatives.

Many companies, including mine, still use ELK for observability. Elasticsearch is versatile, and options like Logstash and Kibana can really tailor your logging needs. Just be prepared for the maintenance side—things like storage, index management, and cleanup are critical to keep it running smoothly.

Logging standards are improving, so if you're not invested in a SaaS product, OpenTelemetry might be worth exploring. While places still use ELK and Splunk, many want a solution that's compatible with OTEL to unify logs, traces, and metrics. The Grafana stack is also a solid option.