Case Study: DNS leader NS1 achieves real-time, scalable telemetry consolidation with Elastic

Elasticsearch as a time series database for telemetry data at NS1

NS1, a leading DNS host and web traffic management company, needed a time series database that could collect and analyze massive, globally distributed telemetry in near real time — nominal spikes reached about 700k data points per second. Their initial split architecture (OpenTSDB for metrics and a small Elasticsearch cluster for logs) couldn’t keep up with terabytes‑per‑day operations and became costly and time‑consuming to manage, so they needed a single, scalable solution with granular retention and strong analysis capabilities.

NS1 consolidated on Elasticsearch with Kibana and Elastic Beats to unify metrics and unstructured telemetry into one operational cluster. The move delivered richer search and data introspection, easy scaling, robust clustering and fault tolerance (allowing zero‑downtime maintenance), strong community and plugin support, and significant savings in time, money, and operational complexity — freeing the team to focus on core product work.

NS1

Christian Saide

DevOps and Software Engineer