Elasticsearch, if you’re not familiar with it, is defined as a distributed restful search and analytics tool.

When it comes to implementing such an infrastructure, our developers not only face the challenges involved in indexing tens of millions of sites with grace and skill, they also write quite extensively about their related adventures, so others can benefit from their experiences.

You can find a plethora of posts on Greg Brown’s blog, under the appropriate tag. Subjects ranging from performance and scaling, all the way to “Elasticsearch, Open Source, and the Future“. And in true Automattician fashion, he isn’t even shy about recognizing his mistakes.

But Greg is not alone! Xiao Yu also recently wrote about the tools he uses, and a plugin he concocted for his own needs:

I’ve taken all that I wished I could do with both of those plugins and created a new Elasticsearch plugin that I call Whatson. This plugin utilizes the power of D3.js to visualize the nodes, indices, and shards within a cluster. It also allows the drilling down to segment data per index or shard. With the focus on visualizing large clusters and highlighting potential problems within. I hope this plugin helps others find and diagnose issues so give it a try.

How’s that for advanced? 🙂