Case Study: IHG achieves scalable, cost-effective hyper-converged log analytics with Elastic

IHG - Customer Case Study

IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group), a global hospitality company with 5,000+ hotels and ~13,000 corporate employees, needed to centralize and scale log aggregation for 1,000+ application logs across East and West coast deployments. Legacy NFS-based logging and terminal grepping left developers with stale mounts, raw unstructured logs and poor access, while their converged infrastructure became costly to grow and difficult to manage (complex firmware upgrades and expensive storage).

IHG built an ELK-based platform and migrated to a hyper‑converged architecture with a hot/warm tier, Kafka-based pipeline and Beats collectors, then tuned the deployment (one Elasticsearch data node per physical Nutanix node, VMDK striping and flash‑tier sizing). The result was simpler management and better cost/performance—transparent hybrid storage, easier scaling and one-click upgrades—supporting ~4 TB/day per site, peaks to 120k indexes/sec (avg ~40k/sec), real‑time dashboards and operation by a single part‑time engineer.

IHG