Case Study: Nativo achieves mission-critical observability and massive scale with Elastic

Nativo ELK to Elastic Stack A Production Journey of 3+ Years

Nativo is a fast-growing native advertising platform that scaled from an early startup to serving top publishers with nearly 200 employees. As the engineering team grew they lacked production visibility and monitoring, and their ELK-based logging pipeline struggled to keep up—ingesting up to 100–150M documents and tens to hundreds of GB per day—while facing upgrade challenges (field-name changes, index bloat and shard growth) that threatened reliability and deployment velocity.

Over three years Nativo rearchitected to a 100% Elastic Stack solution: distributed log enrichment on shippers, standardized JSON, per‑app index strategies (daily/weekly), hot/warm nodes and separate master/data/ingest roles, Beats for system metrics, X‑Pack, and phased migrations using the reindex-from-remote API. The new design became mission‑critical—handling data from 30 apps, 1,000+ custom metrics and 100–150M docs/day—greatly improving operational visibility and deployment velocity while positioning the company for Elastic 6.x features like improved monitoring and ML.

Nativo

Rich Horace

Director of DevOps