Case Study: Netflix achieves real-time, end-to-end messaging visibility with Elastic

Netflix - Customer Case Study

Netflix’s messaging platform sends emails, push notifications, SMS and in‑app messages across many services and AWS regions. As customer growth, new channels and richer message types multiplied, engineering teams faced a “tracking nightmare”: they could not reliably trace individual messages through distributed components to answer real‑time operational questions (delivery status, per‑title activity, country distributions, etc.).

The team instrumented each component to beacon Started/Processed/Done events into Elasticsearch and linked them with GUIDs, then used Kibana and a Wings reporting UI for queries, dashboards and real‑time previews. The solution delivered end‑to‑end, real‑time visibility and fast investigation (e.g., password‑reset SMS timelines), produced actionable metrics and country‑level diagnostics (identifying Twilio error 21614 as a major failure mode in Brazil), and scaled with time‑based indices and a 14‑day retention policy.

Netflix

Devika Chawla

Director of Messaging Engineering