Hacker News Reader

Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

After many years of using Splunk at my job, switching to ELK for personal project use was quite a disappointment for me. Of course, ELK is free and Splunk is very expensive, but I was still surprised at the gap.

This might be derailing the thread a bit, but is there any log management platform like ELK or Splunk that has an expressive and versatile query language like Splunk's? My biggest issue with ELK is that analytics is mostly expected to be done through Kibana's GUI, while with Splunk you can craft terse queries to do almost any sort of transformation and visualization imaginable. I don't like how ELK is so GUI-oriented.

View on HN

Not sure what kind of queries you want to do, but Elasticsearch has a fairly extensive Query DSL that'll let you do all sorts of aggregations:

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...

There is a Python implementation that makes creating complex queries pretty easy:

https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-dsl-py

I agree with the criticisms of Kibana, but I have had no problems querying Elasticsearch directly. It also supports scripted queries if the built-in aggregations aren't enough.

Of course, then you have to build your own visualizations with the results...

I'm not sure I'd consider that a DSL. It's unwieldy to write a full JSON object for every one-off query I want to do.

Using one of their examples, this:

    {
      "query": {
        "filtered": {
          "query": {
            "bool": {
              "must": [{"match": {"title": "python"}}],
              "must_not": [{"match": {"description": "beta"}}]
            }
          },
          "filter": {"term": {"category": "search"}}
        }
      },
      "aggs" : {
        "per_tag": {
          "terms": {"field": "tags"},
          "aggs": {
            "max_lines": {"max": {"field": "lines"}}
          }
        }
      }
    }

would be the following Splunk query:

    title=python description!=beta | stats max(lines) by tags

It would be nice if there was some kind of query compiler that could generate ES JSON from an expressive query language.

The linked python dsl does pretty well. Not as nice as your reduced dsl but.

  s = Search(using=client, index="my-index") \
      .filter("term", category="search") \
      .query("match", title="python")   \
      .query(~Q("match", description="beta"))

https://github.com/NLPchina/elasticsearch-sql/

does exactly that with a reasonably good subset of SQL and ES query language mixed in.

It operates in 2 modes; in one it runs the query, in another it spits back out what the equivalent ES JSON query is. We use this as a quick prototyping tool and modify the ES query as needed, as most of us here still "think" in SQL for a lot of things.

I know, right? I recently did a pilot project with a Splunk competitor called Jut, that was totally query language oriented. It was great, hugely refreshing after Kibana. They're planning on going open source, too, so maybe the language will even survive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com