https://www.niteshchauhan.xyz/posts/elasticsearch/Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://www.niteshchauhan.xyz/posts/elasticsearch/<hr> <h2 id="1-the-problem">1. The Problem</h2> <p>In early 2022, we were running our entire observability stack on Elastic Cloud. It was the obvious choice at the time — managed, hands-off, no operational burden. Except it wasn&rsquo;t hands-off at all.</p> <p>The cluster was regularly falling over. OOM kills on data nodes, indexing rejections during peak load, CPU spiking to saturation with no clear root cause. We were opening support tickets with Elastic, waiting days for responses, and getting back generic JVM tuning suggestions that changed nothing. Meanwhile the bill sat at $25,000 per month.</p>