---
title: Use cases
description: Explore common use cases for Streams.
url: https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/7062/solutions/observability/streams-new/use-cases
products:
  - Elastic Cloud Enterprise
  - Elastic Cloud Hosted
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless
  - Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes
  - Elastic Observability
  - Elastic Stack
  - Elasticsearch
  - Kibana
applies_to:
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless: Generally available
  - Elastic Stack: Generally available since 9.2, Preview in 9.1
---

# Use cases
**Incident investigation**
An SRE receives an alert that a trading application is down. Instead of manually searching through
millions of log lines, they open Streams, where Significant Events has already surfaced a Java
out-of-memory error with the relevant context. In minutes — not hours — they identify the root
cause, escalate to the right team, and restore service.
**High-volume log management for platform team**
A platform team ingests logs from dozens of microservices and needs to control costs without losing
context. Using Streams, they set per-stream retention policies, route high-value logs to longer
retention tiers, and use the failure store to catch and investigate parsing errors — all from a
single UI.