Case Study: Machine Zone achieves real-time, scalable log insight and player-history customer service with Elastic

Machine Zone - Customer Case Study

MZ, a maker of large-scale mobile MMO/RTS games, faced growing operational and customer‑service challenges as game and log volumes exploded. Simple tools like pssh couldn’t aggregate, share, explore, or provide real‑time insight, and their SQL‑backed player history was hard to change and didn’t scale (callouts noted tens of thousands of new records per second), leaving customer service without fast, reliable access to player activity.

They migrated to the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch/Logstash/Kibana), adding enriched automatic and case‑specific fields, dashboards, and a high‑throughput ingestion pipeline (Logstash/Kafka/Storm → ES). The player ledger was mapped into Elasticsearch with the same ORM API, enabling fast lookups for CS while retaining critical SQL for payments/permanent state. The stack now supports engineers and non‑engineers, powers 100+ dashboards and 100% of incident response, and handles very high index rates (>50k/sec) with improved scalability and field flexibility.

Machine Zone

Eric Liaw

Director of Engineering