Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Reseller
Top 5
Sep 11, 2025
The problem is their licensing model, which is a bit confusing. Many customers struggle to understand their total cost of ownership because Elastic licensing is not dependent on easy, quantifiable metrics such as number of users or amount of data. Their licensing model is based on something called Elastic Search memory, which is a bit complex formula. On top of this, there are always dependencies. Once you get the right sizing of Elastic, you need additional infrastructure. You need appropriate infrastructure size that will accommodate Elastic sizing in terms of CPU, memory, and storage. This is a part of the hidden cost that the customer understands.
The license for Elastic Observability is the same as for other uses; you pay for Elastic, and you can use it for various cases. Observability is actually cheaper compared to logs because you're not indexing huge blobs of text and trying to parse those. Instead, it's mostly about numerics, such as CPU percentage at any given time. Elastic is excellent with Time Series data, so even if you have five years' worth of data in the system, you can pinpoint a particular date, and it loads instantly.
Chief Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 20
Nov 8, 2024
Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing. However, sizing and licensing information could be clearer.
The license is reasonably priced, however, the VMs where we host the solution are extremely expensive, making the overall cost in the public cloud high.
Since we are a huge company, Elastic Observability is an affordable solution for us. However, a startup may face some issues with the solution's pricing.
Chief Operating Officer at Integra Micro Software Services, Bangalore
Real User
Top 20
Jul 3, 2023
One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now. We have not gone much deeper into the pricing part right now, but I can speak on this maybe after the quarter, maybe the end of September.
Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay. However, the cost is variable. And, if used properly, I believe it is rather inexpensive. If you use it badly, you must pay. If one is very cheap, and five is very expensive, I would rate the pricing a two out of five.
Managing Director at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jun 22, 2022
I would rate the pricing 4 out of 5. So far, there are just the standard licensing fees. Several of the components are embedded in the license or are even open source. They're even free depending on what you use, which makes it even more appealing.
Line Technical Agent at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jul 5, 2020
We are using the open source version, so there's been no need to build anything ourselves. We do not have a lot of casual issues, and, compared to other solutions like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and New Relic, it's much cheaper. The costs are very, very affordable.
Elastic Observability offers a comprehensive suite for log analytics, application performance monitoring, and machine learning. It integrates seamlessly with platforms like Teams and Slack, enhancing data visualization and scalability for real-time insights.Elastic Observability is designed to support production environments with features like logging, data collection, and infrastructure tracking. Centralized logging and powerful search functionalities make incident response and performance...
The problem is their licensing model, which is a bit confusing. Many customers struggle to understand their total cost of ownership because Elastic licensing is not dependent on easy, quantifiable metrics such as number of users or amount of data. Their licensing model is based on something called Elastic Search memory, which is a bit complex formula. On top of this, there are always dependencies. Once you get the right sizing of Elastic, you need additional infrastructure. You need appropriate infrastructure size that will accommodate Elastic sizing in terms of CPU, memory, and storage. This is a part of the hidden cost that the customer understands.
The license for Elastic Observability is the same as for other uses; you pay for Elastic, and you can use it for various cases. Observability is actually cheaper compared to logs because you're not indexing huge blobs of text and trying to parse those. Instead, it's mostly about numerics, such as CPU percentage at any given time. Elastic is excellent with Time Series data, so even if you have five years' worth of data in the system, you can pinpoint a particular date, and it loads instantly.
Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing. However, sizing and licensing information could be clearer.
The license is reasonably priced, however, the VMs where we host the solution are extremely expensive, making the overall cost in the public cloud high.
Elastic Observability is cheaper in terms of pricing.
I rate the pricing a five out of ten. The product is not that cheap.
The product’s pricing needs improvement. It is expensive compared to Grafana.
We will buy a premium license after POC.
Since we are a huge company, Elastic Observability is an affordable solution for us. However, a startup may face some issues with the solution's pricing.
One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now. We have not gone much deeper into the pricing part right now, but I can speak on this maybe after the quarter, maybe the end of September.
Users have to pay for some features, like the alerts on different channels, because they are unavailable in different source versions.
The price of Elastic Observability is expensive. I rate the price of Elastic Observability an eight out of ten.
Licensing costs are reasonable and we definitely get our money's worth.
Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay. However, the cost is variable. And, if used properly, I believe it is rather inexpensive. If you use it badly, you must pay. If one is very cheap, and five is very expensive, I would rate the pricing a two out of five.
I would rate the pricing 4 out of 5. So far, there are just the standard licensing fees. Several of the components are embedded in the license or are even open source. They're even free depending on what you use, which makes it even more appealing.
I don't have any details in terms of pricing. It's not an aspect of the solution I am familiar with.
We are using the open source version, so there's been no need to build anything ourselves. We do not have a lot of casual issues, and, compared to other solutions like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and New Relic, it's much cheaper. The costs are very, very affordable.