Solutions and use cases
Tip
New to Elastic? Refer to Elastic Fundamentals to understand the Elastic Stack, its components, and your deployment options.
Elastic helps you build applications for three main use cases: search, observability, and security. You can work directly with platform capabilities through APIs, use pre-built solutions with integrated UIs, or combine both approaches.
| Your use case | What to use | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Building search-powered applications | 1. Core search capabilities 2. Elasticsearch solution 3. Elasticsearch Vector Database |
1. Core Elasticsearch search features available across all deployment types, solutions, and project types 2. Additional UI tools that complement the core search features 3. Dedicated Elastic Cloud Serverless project type for AI-powered retrieval (RAG, recommendations, semantic and hybrid search) with vector-tuned defaults |
| Monitoring applications or infrastructure | Observability solution | Monitor and troubleshoot with logs, metrics, and traces |
| Protecting against threats | Security solution | Detect and respond to security threats |
Tip
Not sure which to choose? Start with the Elasticsearch solution for general-purpose search and analytics across structured data, logs, metrics, documents, and vectors. On Elastic Cloud Serverless, choose Elasticsearch Vector Database when embeddings drive the workload. Choose Elastic Observability or Elastic Security when you need those solution features.
- On Elastic Cloud Serverless, select a solution as your project type when creating a project.
- On Elastic Cloud Hosted, ECE, ECK, and self-managed clusters, select a default solution view when creating a deployment, or configure per space.