Securing and Optimising Hybrid Cloud Monitoring for a Global Financial Services Firm with Elastic
Client
A global professional services enterprise in India operating within a complex hybrid cloud setup across on-prem, AWS, and Azure. The firm supports financial services workloads using the Elastic Stack for search and observability, Docker for containerized deployments, and CloudWatch for cloud-level monitoring.
Project Context
The client needed an evaluation of their monitoring setup, along with a secure monitoring cluster and a hardened Docker-based Elastic Stack deployment. The work focused on fixing key security issues, performance gaps, and snapshot failures, while also improving Logstash pipelines, dashboards, and overall best practices.
Project Objectives
- Establish a secure, dedicated monitoring cluster.
- Resolve certificate-related security errors and configure TLS/SSL trust.
- Optimize cluster performance, snapshot reliability, and Logstash pipeline efficiency.
Challenges
The project was driven by the need to resolve critical issues related to:
- Security: Certificate-related security errors and the need for secure trust validation.
- Performance: Suboptimal cluster performance.
- Observability/Reliability: Snapshot reliability issues and inefficient Logstash pipelines/dashboards.
Solution
- Architecture & Security: Built a secure monitoring cluster with Fleet/Agent policies & validated TLS/SSL trust relationships.
- Performance: Enhanced query speed and cluster stability through thread pool tuning and load optimization.
- Data Resilience: Implemented Snapshot Lifecycle Management (SLM) to prevent snapshot failures and ensure reliability.
- Observability & Optimization: Streamlined Logstash pipelines and integrated CloudWatch dashboards for unified monitoring.
