Case Study: CenturyLink achieves fast, scalable network management and dramatically reduced outages with Elastic

CenturyLink Building a Network Management Framework with Open Source

CenturyLink, one of the largest U.S. telecommunications providers, operates a vast network spanning over 450,000 route miles with more than 300,000 devices generating over 1 million alerts daily. Rapid growth and many disparate network management systems strained their legacy adapter-Oracle architecture, causing complex queries, repeated outages, and an inability to scale as new partners and device types were added.

To fix this they adopted a CQRS pattern and moved query workloads to Elasticsearch (alongside Redis, Kafka, custom UI, and Logstash plugins), enabling fast, scalable indexing and search. Query times dropped from minutes to seconds, outages and production defects were greatly reduced, the system now supports ~1,000 users reliably, and the Elastic Stack has opened the door to broader analytics and a predictive operations framework.

CenturyLink