Case Study: Kenna Security achieves 4B-document scale and 200M+ daily indexing with Elastic

How Kenna Security Speeds Up Elasticsearch Indexing at Scale

Kenna Security helps large enterprises prioritize and remediate cybersecurity risk by ingesting massive asset and vulnerability datasets (tens of thousands of assets and millions of vulnerabilities), storing truth in MySQL and indexing into Elasticsearch for fast querying. As data grew, their poorly configured Elasticsearch cluster became unstable and slow—pegging CPU, returning 429 errors, and struggling to keep millions of daily updates in sync.

Kenna fixed this by tuning indexing: increasing the refresh interval (e.g., to 30s), using optimized bulk requests (~1,000 docs per batch), and routing documents by shard (grouping by asset_id) to reduce thread contention. Those changes let the team scale from hundreds of millions to 4 billion documents and comfortably process over 200 million updates per day while keeping search performance stable and room to grow.

Kenna Security

Molly Struve

Sr. Site Reliability Engineer