Case Study: Adyen achieves near real-time, scalable payment search and platform monitoring with Elastic

Why Elasticsearch is an indispensable component of the Adyen stack

Adyen is a global payments platform that processes millions of transactions across many payment methods and channels. Merchants using Adyen’s Customer Area need immediate, reliable visibility into payments (searching by order, email, reference, etc.), while internal teams require real-time, end-to-end monitoring and alerting across a very large logging footprint. These needs — low-latency merchant search, flexible cross-team monitors, and massive log storage — created a challenge at scale.

Adyen addressed this by building on Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack: an in-house streaming/consumer framework filters, transforms and bulk-indexes payment documents into Elasticsearch with retry logic to deliver near real-time search, while analytic events fed into Elastic power customizable monitors (spikes, drops, anomalies) and integrated alerting. Kibana-based log search and a smooth migration (12 TB indexed during a v1.7→v7.6 upgrade, supporting up to petabyte-scale logging) delivered a scalable, reliable platform: merchants see payments within seconds, teams get flexible alerts, and operations remain resilient.

Adyen