Most engineering teams don't set out to build enterprise log analytics. But one feature request leads to another, and suddenly you're maintaining an entire distributed system.
What teams discover after committing to build their own
Log search isn't just search. It's distributed systems, information retrieval, data pipelines, relevance science, security, observability, and cost engineering—all at once.
Continuous ingestion from multiple sources. Schema drift. Corrupted data reprocessing. Re-indexing without downtime. Each is a project unto itself.
Tuning ranking functions, boosting logic, and weighting never ends. You'll need human-labeled datasets and A/B testing infrastructure.
Index growth outpaces data growth. Memory pressure increases unpredictably. Clusters require constant over-provisioning.
Replica strategies. Cross-zone resilience. Failover logic. Backward-compatible formats. Each failure mode needs handling.
Per-user permissions. Per-document ACLs. Field-level security. Audit logging. Compliance certification. Security is never "done."
Search demands continuous attention: cluster tuning, memory incidents, slow query debugging, upgrade testing. It becomes someone's full-time job.
As log volume grows, every problem gets worse. What worked at 100GB/day fails at 1TB/day. Architecture decisions compound.
Senior engineers maintaining search can't focus on product differentiation. Your best people become infrastructure operators.
How "simple log search" becomes a multi-year commitment
What you're really paying for
KalDB provides the complete solution
OpenSearch Bulk API compatible. Works with Logstash, Fluent Bit, and any existing pipeline.
Full-text search with the same Lucene engine. Sub-second queries at petabyte scale.
99.999999999% durability. No data loss. Unlimited retention at $0.023/GB.
Query compute scales independently. No capacity planning. No over-provisioning.
Use your existing dashboards. OpenSearch data source works out of the box.
Battle-tested at Slack. No need to learn from your own failures.
Your engineers should be building product features, not maintaining log infrastructure. KalDB handles the hard parts so you can focus on what differentiates your business.
Try KalDB open source today or talk to us about production deployment