Case Study: Blackboard achieves scalable, cost-effective log analytics with ChaosSearch

How Blackboard Pivoted Their Log Analytics Approach When the World Went Virtual

Blackboard, the global education technology company, needed a better way to handle rapidly growing log data as online learning usage surged during the pandemic. Its ELK-based log analytics environment became unstable and expensive to manage, forcing the team to duplicate data across Elasticsearch and Amazon S3 while limiting retention to just 30 days.

ChaosSearch replaced Elasticsearch with a fully managed log analytics platform running directly on Blackboard’s Amazon S3 data lake and accessed through Kibana. With ChaosSearch, Blackboard eliminated data duplication and cluster management, expanded retention from 30 days to unlimited, and kept pace with a 3,000%+ increase in product usage while giving SREs back 10 to 15 hours per week for higher-value work.

Blackboard

Joel Snook

Senior Director of DevOps Engineering