Case Study: Rightmove achieves scalable search and centralized logging across 50+ microservices with Elastic

Scaling the Elastic Stack in a Microservices Architecture Rightmove

Rightmove, the UK’s #1 property portal serving about 55 million requests a day, moved from monoliths to a microservices architecture and quickly outgrew manual log inspection. By 2017 more than 50 microservices were emitting logs and the team needed a scalable, reliable way to centralize, process and query those logs without creating processing bottlenecks or losing data.

They implemented an Elastic Stack pipeline—doing heavy parsing on the application side, buffering with a Redis queue, and using lightweight publisher Logstash nodes—plus consistent JSON logging, correlation IDs, Logstash config templates, Puppet for deployment, CI/CD with Jenkins/Nexus, and a Docker-based dev mirror. The result: faster, more reliable searches and debugging in Kibana, shorter investigation times, empowered support teams, clearer deployment and capacity visibility, and a scalable alerting and monitoring platform that helped Rightmove grow while keeping systems healthy.

Rightmove