Case Study: John Deere achieves scalable, real-time telemetry logging and analytics with Elastic Cloud Enterprise

From ELK Stack to Elastic Cloud Enterprise Scaling Up Capabilities at John Deere

John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group (ISG) turned the company’s farming expertise into a data-driven business, powering telematics and agronomic apps like JDLink that collect GPS, machine health, and crop data. As JDLink grew from an initial 25-server deployment, ISG faced scaling problems and outages and needed a centralized way to aggregate logs and visualize the whole system.

ISG adopted the Elastic Stack in 2013 and built Logcentral@Deere, expanding from a 4-node cluster to multiple cloud clusters managed with Elastic Cloud Enterprise. Today the environment handles about 18 billion documents (11 TB), streams ~20,000 events per second from dozens of applications, and runs clusters up to 51 nodes—benefiting from ECE features like integrated auth, monitoring and alerts, cross-cluster search, seamless upgrades, and machine learning.

John Deere

Tim Arp

Senior Operations Engineer in the Intelligent Solutions Group