2025 was a defining year for Pulse.
What started a few years ago as a set of tools to observe Elasticsearch and OpenSearch clusters during issues, has continued its evolution into something much bigger: an AI-native control center for running search and data infrastructure with confidence. Whether self-managed, hybrid, or fully managed by a cloud provider - Pulse can now proactively prevent issues and help with diagnosing root-causes of any disturbance.
Our mission has stayed consistent:
- Make Elasticsearch & OpenSearch cluster maintenance easier
- Reduce operational toil
- Shorten MTTR when things break
- Empower developers and platform teams to shift left
- Optimize cost and reduce total cost of ownership
- Deliver a world-class experience for self-managed clusters - anywhere
In 2025, we invested heavily in intelligence, performance tooling, visualization, and collaboration. The result: over 600 improvements shipped across the platform, with major leaps forward in AI SRE and AI DBA capabilities.
This post is a comprehensive overview of everything we shipped this year - and why it matters.
AI-Powered Intelligence & Diagnostics
The biggest theme of 2025 was clear: AI should do the heavy lifting.
Instead of forcing engineers to manually correlate metrics, logs, and alerts, Pulse now actively helps you understand what’s happening - and why. By intimately knowing your clusters, and leveraging superb AI engineering - we were able to achieve an experience which is by far better than your friendly neighborhood monitoring dashboards or ChatGPT.
AI Health Summary & Root Cause Analysis
We introduced a new generation of AI-powered diagnostics designed to cut straight to the signal:
AI Health Summary Cards Intelligent, context-aware summaries of your cluster’s health, highlighting the most critical risks and regressions - without forcing you to dig through dashboards.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for Alerts Alerts are no longer dead ends. Pulse now performs automated investigations, correlating cluster state, workload behavior, and historical patterns - and linking directly back to the root cause.
Health Assessment Check Management Fine-grained control over which checks run, how they behave, and how they impact alerting - allowing teams to tailor monitoring to their environment and maturity level.
AI-Powered Cost Optimizer A comprehensive cost optimization engine that analyzes resource usage, workload patterns, and cluster topology to:
- Identify waste
- Recommend concrete savings
- Suggest alternative cluster cost plans when optimization opportunities exist
Together, these features mark a major step forward in Pulse’s vision of AI-assisted operations - where humans stay in control, but no longer carry all the cognitive load.
Free Performance & Query Tools for Power Users
Performance troubleshooting is one of the most time-consuming and expertise-heavy tasks in search operations. In 2025, we expanded Pulse into a full performance engineering toolkit.
Pulse now includes a growing suite of professional-grade tools, each built to answer a very specific question - fast.
👉 Full details and live tools: https://pulse.support/tools
Highlights include:
- Query profiling and visualization
- Index mapping analysis
- Workload and indexing diagnostics
- Cluster behavior exploration tools
Each tool has its own dedicated page, deep explanations, and actionable insights - turning Pulse into a place engineers actually work, not just observe.
Alerts & Notifications
Alerting should trigger action - not chaos.
Incident.io Integration
We shipped a first-class Incident.io integration, bringing Pulse directly into modern incident workflows:
- Direct alert routing to Incident.io
- Automatic incident creation from Pulse alerts
- Bi-directional linking back to Pulse Root Cause Analysis
- Clear ownership and faster coordination during outages
The result: shorter MTTR, less context switching, and better post-incident learning.
Dashboards (Re-imagined)
Pulse goes far beyond dashboards - but when you do need to look at your cluster's metrics, it should be intuitive, fast, and insightful.
In 2025, we rethought how cluster nodes and indexes are visualized and improved our dashboards even further.
Index Treemap Visualization
A completely new way to understand your indices at a glance:
- Hierarchical treemap showing index sizes
- Immediate identification of large or problematic indices
- Interactive drill-down
- Visual icons for different index states
- Unified panel combining treemap and index list
- Effortless size comparison across the entire cluster
This alone has changed how teams reason about storage, shard layouts, and cost.
Enhanced Index Information
Small details that make a big difference:
- Tooltips with last event timestamps
- Clear closed index indicators
- Improved inactive index tooltips
New Node Stats Charts
We introduced a new generation of charts and dashboards:
- Bulk status code charts (4xx highlighted by default)
- Advanced indexing charts
- Pipeline stats dashboards
- Better grouping of related metrics for faster comprehension
Graph Expansion
When details matter, screen space matters too:
- Expandable graphs in full-screen modals
- Clear legends and improved readability
- Better use of modern displays
Shard Heatmap Interaction Improvements
- Searchable and copyable shard labels
- Drag-scrollable heatmaps for easier navigation in large clusters
SOC 2 Achieved
In 2025, Pulse achieved SOC 2 compliance, reinforcing our commitment to security, trust, and enterprise readiness.
This milestone supports broader adoption across regulated environments and larger organizations.
Looking Forward
2025 pushed Pulse far beyond monitoring — into a new era of automation and proactive, agentic SRE functionality for OpenSearch and Elasticsearch.
With AI-powered diagnostics, performance engineering tools, cost intelligence, and enterprise-grade compliance, Pulse now helps teams reduce operational effort, accelerate resolution, and optimize every layer of their search environments.
From small UI refinements to major AI breakthroughs, every improvement this year was driven by a single goal:
to make running search infrastructure easier, smarter, and more predictable.
Key Highlights
- AI-First by Design — Root Cause Analysis, AI Health Summaries, and AI Cost Optimization redefine how clusters are operated. Pulse is now the only AI SRE platform dedicated to Elasticsearch and OpenSearch cluster admins.
- Real Tools, Not Just Monitoring — Professional-grade performance and analysis tools built directly into Pulse.
- Cost Optimization at the Core — Reducing waste, lowering TCO, and helping teams make smarter infrastructure decisions.
- Developer & SRE Experience — Hundreds of UX improvements, from navigation to dashboards, driven by real user feedback.
- Enterprise-Ready — Stronger security, access controls, and compliance foundations.
Thank you for being part of the Pulse journey — here’s to an even smarter, bolder 2026 🚀
