Elasticsearch
TL;DR
- Customer: Frontiers, a global open-access research publisher
- Tech Stack: 11-cluster self-hosted Elasticsearch deployment
- Needs: Proactive monitoring, expert support, and better visibility into complex Elasticsearch environments
- Results: Increased cluster stability, reduced operational stress, and faster incident resolution with Pulse
About Frontiers
Frontiers is a leading global open-access research publisher committed to empowering scientists and accelerating innovation. With a platform supporting researchers across more than 1,800 academic fields, Frontiers delivers high-quality, peer-reviewed publications at scale — backed by technology that ensures speed, accessibility, and impact.
As a tech-forward publisher, Frontiers runs a complex infrastructure that serves both its internal teams and external publishing partners. At the heart of that infrastructure lies search — powered by self-hosted Elasticsearch clusters that are essential to platform reliability and performance.
The Challenge: Critical Infrastructure With Limited Search Expertise
To support its operations, Frontiers manages 11 Elasticsearch clusters, five of which are dedicated to external publishing clients. These clusters are mission-critical — powering everything from indexing and content delivery to publisher workflows and internal tooling.
While Frontiers has a capable DevOps and sysadmin team, the company lacked dedicated Elasticsearch expertise. This led to a number of recurring challenges:
- Limited Elasticsearch Expertise: Without specialists in-house, engineers often found themselves firefighting complex search issues, diverting time from high-priority projects.
- Operational Risk: Elasticsearch issues directly impacted service quality and SLAs, increasing pressure on internal teams and elevating cognitive load.
- Reactive Maintenance: Existing observability tools offered limited insights, and most issues were only detected after they affected performance.
- Inadequate External Support: Past attempts to use outside support services proved disappointing, with slow response times and vague advice during critical incidents.
“Elasticsearch is a critical part of our operational platform,” explains Corina Mutu, Technical Project Manager at Frontiers. “Without specialized support, every issue became a crisis, creating constant stress for our team and impacting customer experience.”
The Solution: Visibility, Support, and Proactive Management With Pulse
Frontiers engaged Pulse in April 2024, looking for a long-term partner who could fill the gaps and bring deep Elasticsearch expertise, proactive insights, and real-time visibility into their infrastructure.
After a seamless onboarding process, Pulse began delivering tangible value through three primary capabilities:
📊 Proactive Cluster Health Assessments
Pulse’s automated health checks gave Frontiers ongoing visibility into their Elasticsearch environment. These reports surfaced early signs of performance degradation, infrastructure risk, and architectural inefficiencies — allowing the team to address issues before they turned into outages.
“The health assessments have been one of the most important additions to our maintenance workflow,” says Jorge Lopez, Devops Engineer at Frontiers. “They save us time, confirm performance concerns early, and help us prioritize changes. It’s like having an always-on assistant for our clusters.”
🛠 24/7 Expert Elasticsearch Support
Pulse’s always-available support became a strategic asset for the Frontiers team — offering fast, informed responses from engineers who live and breathe Elasticsearch.
“Having Pulse in our corner 24/7 is invaluable,” says Corina. “Over the past year, we’ve reached out to them on everything from diagnostics to deep configuration issues — and every time, they’ve helped us resolve things quickly and confidently.”
📈 Unified Dashboards and Monitoring
Pulse’s centralized dashboards have enabled clear, convenient visibility across all of Frontier’s clusters, replacing a previously fragmented, tool-heavy monitoring setup with a single source of truth.
Results & Impact: Stability, Confidence, and Time Saved
Since adopting Pulse, Frontiers has seen measurable improvements in how they operate and maintain their Elasticsearch infrastructure:
- Faster Incident Detection and Resolution: Issues are now caught earlier and resolved faster, reducing operational downtime and firefighting.
- Reduced Operational Toil: By automating cluster checks and offloading complex diagnostics, Frontiers’ teams regained time for more strategic work.
- Improved Customer Experience: Greater stability and faster recovery times directly benefit external publishing partners.
- Peace of Mind for Sysadmins: Perhaps most important of all — less stress, less scrambling, and more confidence.
“It’s hard to overstate the peace of mind Pulse has brought to our team,” says Jorge. “This might not be a traditional success metric, but they’ve definitely reduced the number of grey hairs caused by worrying about cluster stability.”
Corina adds: “Pulse has been a breath of fresh air. They’ve lowered the cognitive load on our operations team and helped us shift from firefighting to strategy. The impact is being felt across the company.”
What’s Next: Confident Growth Backed by Pulse
As Frontiers continues to grow, they’re preparing for two major cluster migrations:
- Migration from Elasticsearch 5.6 to 8.x
- Migration from Elasticsearch 7.17 to 8.x Pulse will provide architecture guidance, migration planning, and hands-on support to ensure smooth transitions with minimal disruption. With Pulse in their corner, Frontiers can scale confidently — backed by the tools, insights, and expert support they need to deliver world-class service to the global scientific community.
