Top all-time · #3227
Sematext
Company blog · sematext.com/blogsystemsdata
Sematext is the company blog at sematext.com, writing about systems and data. Since 2013, 24 different Hacker News readers have linked it 69 times, most often “Docker Container Monitoring and Management Challenges”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (17) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Sematext's blog for a Solr vs Elasticsearch comparison, Elasticsearch security and backups, and X-Pack alternatives. Most other comments concern its products and services.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 17 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
IT system monitoring and management tools for DevOps who need 24x7 live visibility into their infrastructure.
Most-linked posts?
- Docker Container Monitoring and Management Challenges2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-04-16
- 5 Logstash Alternatives2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-09-16
- Scaling Elasticsearch by Cleaning the Cluster State2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-10-19
- Using EBPF from Go for Fun and Profit2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-03-05
- /blog/x-pack-alternatives/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-02
- How to instrument userspace processes with uprobes and eBPF2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-27
- Monitoring ClickHouse with Sematext2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-03-04
What Hacker News says?
So what happens with https://sematext.com/ ? Outside of AWS, they use open-distro and do compete with elastic.co. Will they just go out of business by not being able to upgrade elastic?
Comment linking /
on “Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing”Submitted Open Distro for Elasticsearch Review as a story · 14 points
HN discussionLMGTFY, https://sematext.com/blog/x-pack-alternatives/ Can't recommend Sentinl & SearchGuard enough.
Comment linking /blog/x-pack-alternatives/
on “Elastic files for an IPO”Submitted What Is Real User Monitoring as a story · 10 points
HN discussionThere are other companies that offer enterprise support for Elasticsearch (e.g. https://sematext.com/support/elasticsearch-production-suppor... ) as well as training an such. No loss for ES users there.
Comment linking /support/elasticsearch-production-support/
on “Open Distro for Elasticsearch”Submitted Using EBPF from Go for Fun and Profit as a story · 7 points
HN discussionHere is one good comparison from Sematext (Sematext provides both Solr and Elasticsearch consulting, support, and training, so we are familiar with both Solr and ES and have no horse in the race): https://sematext.com/blog/solr-vs-elasticsearch-differences/
Comment linking /blog/solr-vs-elasticsearch-differences/
on “Open Distro for Elasticsearch”Submitted Now Open Source: Sematext Monitoring Agent as a story · 7 points
HN discussionWe've used Grafana with Sematext Logsene (which exposes Elasticsearch API, so it's like having Grafana talk to ES). Here's a short howto + video: https://sematext.com/blog/2015/12/14/using-grafana-with-elas...
Comment linking /blog/2015/12/14/using-grafana-with-elasticsearch-for-log-analytics-2/
on “Grafana 4.0 with alerting is released”Submitted 5 Logstash Alternatives as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThat's interesting to hear. Would love to read about how Vespa compares to Solr and ES. This may be of interest to you: https://sematext.com/opensee/report/project/trend?q=ElasticS... Would you happen to know how Vespa compares to ES in terms of memory or CPU footprint? Have you done apples to apples comparison by any chance?
Comment linking /opensee/report/project/trend?q=ElasticSearch,Solr,Vespa,Lucene
on “Ask HN: Are Lucene/Solr/ES Still Used for Search?”Submitted Solr Key Metrics to Monitor as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> so tired of Elastic just randomly killing their clusters out of nowhere and having to spend basically triple to deal with it that they're bringing it all in house. That is because Elastic Cloud is not a fully managed Elasticsearch. People often don't get that with Elastic Cloud you are still responsible for your ES cluster. That's one of the differentiators that e.g. Sematext has (disclaimer: founder). > AWS's hos…
Comment linking /logsene
on “Ask HN: Are Lucene/Solr/ES Still Used for Search?”Submitted Key Metrics for Monitoring Clickhouse as a story · 5 points
HN discussionhttps://sematext.com/cloud/ Sematext Cloud has been working well for me in a relatively small startup (Couple of thousands active users). Cheap solution and easy to get started.
Comment linking /cloud/
on “Ask HN: How do you handle logging?”Submitted OpenTracing: Zipkin as Distributed Tracer as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHi snewman, I am currently using logdna as my splunk alternative, but it's not very good. Why should I try scalyr next, over the other alternatives ? My main constraint is the solution should be at least half as good as splunk, and cost less than $50 a month (I generate less than 1G a day). Your pricing seems to be reasonable. But how do you compare to splunk on features ? Here are the other tools I am considering t…
Comment linking /logsene/
on “Build versus Buy”Submitted Running Solr in Docker: How and Why as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAny modern monitoring service will provide you with volume discounts if you have hundreds or thousands of servers. Since you mention Papertrail specifically in the context of costs - Papertrail is actually a bit pricey relative to the competition. For example, compare https://papertrailapp.com/plans to https://sematext.com/logsene/#plans-and-pricing . I think Sematext Logsene is 2-3 times cheaper than Papertrail. La…
Comment linking /logsene/
on “What I Learned Managing Site Reliability for Some of the Busiest Gambling Sites”Submitted Topping Top New Real-Time Process Monitoring by Sematext as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAt Sematext we replaced our HBase based metrics datastore with Clickhouse. We are happy with the performance gain and flexibility. We also added support for Clickhouse monitoring - https://sematext.com/blog/clickhouse-monitoring-sematext/
Comment linking /blog/clickhouse-monitoring-sematext/
on “ClickHouse cost-efficiency in action: analyzing 500B rows on an Intel NUC”Submitted Entity Extraction with SpaCy as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIf you look for real FOSS ES security i recommend Search Guard https://github.com/floragunncom/search-guard . This is a ASL2 licensed repo which provide all kinds of basic security for Elasticsearch including SSL/TLS. So the content in this repo are real fully "open source". Then there is a second non-FOSS repository https://github.com/floragunncom/search-guard-enterprise-modu... which contains all the enterprise/ad…
Comment linking /blog/x-pack-alternatives/
on “Opening the code of our X-Pack features”Submitted Elasticsearch Monitoring Guide as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWell yes a ton :) And these are the ones off the top of my head... others feel free to list ones I'm missing Books: Lucene in Action http://manning.com/books/lucene-in-action Solr in Action https://www.manning.com/books/solr-in-action Relevant Search http://manning.com/books/relevant-search (disclaimer, my book) Elasticsearch Definitive Guide (free/online) https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Google may rank sites for queries that don't appear on the page at all”Submitted Entity Extraction with Scikit-Learn Classifiers as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis is a good opportunity to update my search reading list. Books * Lucene in Action - A bit out of date, but it has a lot of the core concepts of Lucene. 10 years ago, this was the go-to book even if you’re working with Solr or Elasticsearch, to understand the core data structures * Relevant Search (my book) - Introduction to optimizing the relevance of full text search engines. Getting a bit old now, but still re…
Comment linking /training/
on “Ask HN: I want to dive into how to make search engines”Submitted Benefits to Run Elastic Stack in the Cloud as a story · 4 points
HN discussionES is not really a database :) most databases have some authentication features out of the box ... but true: for those kids who don't know how to block a port, configure nginx proxies etc.: https://sematext.com/blog/2017/01/18/elasticsearch-security-... The most valuable part is about backups for ES indices - this could save you some bitcoins ;)
Comment linking /blog/2017/01/18/elasticsearch-security-authentication-encryption-backup/
on “Hundreds of unsecured Elasticsearch servers wiped, similarly to MongoDB attack”Submitted Linux Kernel Observability Through EBPF as a story · 4 points
HN discussion