Search with OpenSearch FAQ

General

What is OCI Search with OpenSearch?

OCI Search with OpenSearch is an insight engine offered as an OCI managed service, making it easy for customers to ingest, search, visualize, and analyze data. We remove the operational burden of managing search infrastructure by automating typical maintenance activities, including patching, updating, upgrading, backups, and resizing. Customers can ingest, store, search, and analyze huge volumes of data quickly and see results in near real time.

OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards—a visualization and user interface—were forked from Elasticsearch 7.10.2 and Kibana 7.10.2 in 2021 and now operate as an Apache 2.0–licensed, separate open source project supported by a community that includes Oracle and AWS as key contributing members. We offer OpenSearch versions 1.2, 2.11, and 2.15.

What versions of OpenSearch are supported?

We offer OpenSearch versions 1.2, 2.11, and 2.15.

How did OpenSearch come about? Why use OpenSearch if I already use the ELK (Elastic, Logstash, Kibana) stack?

Elastic announced they will change their software licensing strategy and will not release new versions of Elasticsearch and OpenSearch Dashboards under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2). Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic License or the Server Side Public License. However, both licenses limit usage of the software in ways that make it unacceptable to many in the open source community. In order to ensure open source versions of both packages, OpenSearch was created and will maintain an ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.

What shapes are supported for OCI Search?

OCI Search has an unparalleled level of configuration. You’re not locked into specific shapes or SKUs; instead, we use flex shapes that allow you to configure the precise number of compute cores and amount of memory and storage based on your exact requirements.

Can I run the full ELK stack in OCI Search?

OCI Search customers can customize their OCPU (compute cores), memory, storage, backups, node count, and node type (for example, master, data, and Open Dashboard nodes). While Logstash isn’t included as part of the managed service, you can send data to OCI Search using Logstash, Beats, and dozens of other clients and applications, just as you would send data to any other Elasticsearch cluster.

What does OCI Search manage on my behalf?

OCI Search manages the work involved in setting up your cluster, including provisioning infrastructure. Once your cluster is running, OCI Search handles common administrative tasks, such as performing backups, monitoring instances, and patching software. OCI Search integrates with OCI metrics to produce metrics that provide information about the state of the clusters and offers customers the ability to modify their cluster configuration and total data size without a service disruption.

Why should I move to the OCI Search managed service?

Managing your own ELK stack can consume significant resources just for operational management and overhead. Moving to a managed service empowers customers to schedule operational actions, and OCI Search takes away those tasks. Also, from a price standpoint, OCI Search is an extremely cost-competitive solution compared to self-managed or other cloud-managed solutions.

What is the total data size supported?

OCI will continue to enhance scale limits to meet the needs of our largest customers. We currently support 300 TB, and larger capacity sizes are available on request.

Is OCI Search available in all regions and realms?

OCI Search is available in all OCI commercial regions.

Compare and contrast

How much does OCI Search with OpenSearch cost?

Customers are billed only for the underlying infrastructure the clusters consume—including the compute, memory, block volume, and object storage costs—without any upcharge. OCI Search will charge a service fee of US$0.25 per hour per data node when more than two data nodes are used per cluster, with service fees waived for the first two nodes in a cluster. For example, if a customer has three data nodes, they’ll be charged US$0.25 per cluster hour. The first two data nodes incur no service fee. Only the third data node and additional data nodes thereafter will incur a service fee of US$0.25 per data node per cluster.

Is the service comparable with AWS or Elastic.co hosted/managed options?

Yes, and we will continue to enhance OCI’s OpenSearch offering based on customer input and offer scale and performance improvements to provide customers with the optimal OpenSearch development and operational experience.

What's the service-level agreement (SLA) for OCI Search?

OCI Search is designed with high availability as a core tenet and is backed by OCI’s enterprise-grade infrastructure availability uptimes. The service provides a 99.9% service-level objective, and SLAs will be published after operationalizing production workloads in the near future.

Getting started

How do you reach OCI Search with OpenSearch in the OCI console?

• Go to https://cloud.oracle.com.
• Go to the upper-left drop-down menu, and select Databases.
• You'll see OCI Search with OpenSearch there.

How do I migrate to OCI Search?

We recommend you evaluate our service in parallel with your current solution to start. If you only focus on time series–type data, you will cut over to OCI Search with OpenSearch once we’ve met all your requirements and stop ingesting to your existing stack. If you need all the data in your existing cluster, you'll need to take a snapshot of your current production cluster, save that data to your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage bucket, and then restore the snapshot to your service instance. A sample sequence of steps to complete that migration is outlined below.

• Create a point-in-time copy of your production data using snapshotting, available with Elastic or OpenSearch APIs or via several cloud consoles.
• Once this is complete, you'll need to move your data to a service-accessible OCI Object Storage location.
• From the service console, in Cluster details, click the Restore button and select the snapshot. Follow the steps. If you run into any issues reach out to our support team.

We’re looking to simplify and automate the migration process in an upcoming release.

Additional details

Can I resize my cluster?

You can increase node counts as well as node configuration (OCPU and memory). This means you can increase both vertically and horizontally. You can also increase your storage size at any time up to 0.3 PB, and you may request additional storage as well. Decreasing node and configuration settings is a rarely used operation and is being considered for a future release based on customer requests.

Do you support x-pack features?

X-pack features are not supported today; however, we are actively building out additional functionality. Please check out the OpenSearch release calendar to see what’s coming.

Will you ensure my cluster is distributed across availability and fault domains?

OCI Search with OpenSearch is designed with enterprise-grade availability as a core tenet. For clusters with more than two nodes of any type (for example, data nodes, master nodes, and so on), OCI will automatically provision those nodes across domains, enabling resilience across availability domains for high availability.

Is there a limit to the number of documents or indexes I can have in my cluster?

While OCI does not enforce any service limit on the number of indexes or documents you can store in your cluster, the OpenSearch software is constrained by underlying OS and hardware infrastructure.

Do you offer user-level permissions to the OCI Search cluster or OpenSearch Dashboards?

Yes, you can configure user access to different charts and data within the OpenSearch Dashboards console. Review the documentation for more details on role-based access.

Does OCI Search support community plugins?

Yes. Review this list of supported plugins for more details. If there’s a plugin you require, please submit a support request via the OCI console, and we’ll determine when it can be included in the service.

Does OCI Search support integration with Logstash?

Yes. Simply put, you will point your Logstash instance to the OCI Search API endpoint for data ingestion.

Can I use object storage from my own tenancy for backups and snapshots?

Yes, but it’s not necessary. OCI Search with OpenSearch is a fully managed, end-to-end service offering availability and data protection. Managing the backups and storage in our tenancy relieves customers from the burden of managing backups and associated storage while enabling OCI to perform operational tasks reliably and securely. If you would like to use your OCI Object Storage, you can utilize the Snapshot API to do so. Check out the documentation for more details on backups and snapshots.

Why do I need a private endpoint?

OCI has a strong commitment to security and always wants the customer to control who accesses their cluster and data. Private endpoints allow for a highly secure connection between a service and a customer’s tenancy. Leveraging private endpoints makes it possible for the clusters to function within the service tenancy for ops management while maintaining security by limiting resource access to IP addresses within the customer's subnet and disallowing access from any other locations.

The OpenSearch project appears to be run by AWS. What is Oracle doing to contribute to the open source project?

Although Amazon and AWS are the stewards of the OpenSearch project and associated repositories, there are many significant contributors, including Capital One, Logz.io, OCI, Red Hat, and SAP. OCI has begun contributing to the project and will continue to contribute to the OpenSearch community.