Case study
One Year of Offline Log Visibility for a Government Agency
How SquareShift built a fully air-gapped Elastic observability platform, with its own local software registries, giving a critical-infrastructure operator a year of log visibility across OpenShift, Windows, Linux, and network gear.
Book a session →
Client
A critical-infrastructure operator that must run every system fully cut off from outside networks, with no connection to the public internet.
Industry
Critical Infrastructure
Services
Stack
Elasticsearch · Kibana · Logstash · Fleet Server · Red Hat OpenShift · LDAP
How did SquareShift build an air-gapped Elastic observability platform?
The challenge
The client operates critical infrastructure and must run every system fully cut off from the internet. It needed a full year of log storage and visibility across OpenShift, Windows, and Linux systems, plus network gear from Cisco and Fortinet, with no connection to any outside network.
What we delivered
SquareShift built a production Elastic cluster backed by its own local software registries, so nothing had to reach an outside server to update or run. Six high-volume data nodes now carry the cluster's load, with a separate monitoring cluster watching its own health.
Data comes in through Elastic Agents on OpenShift, Linux, and Windows machines, plus Logstash pipelines reading Cisco and Fortinet devices. Every connection is secured with client-issued SSL/TLS certificates, and users sign in through one shared LDAP system.
The outcome
The cluster now keeps logs for a full year to meet a mandatory retention rule, with no live connection to any outside package registry or update path. The operator gets full observability across a mixed device fleet without ever opening a path to the public internet. To see how we run log analytics on Elastic, read about our Elastic services.
An air-gapped platform isn't just Elastic with the internet turned off. Every registry, every update, every certificate has to originate inside the boundary, or the isolation isn't real.
Observability & Reliability Practice Lead, SquareShift
