Scenarios

Some typical capacity planning scenarios include:

  1. Increasing Ingest Rate:

    • Ensure pipelines can handle higher data throughput without introducing bottlenecks or latency.

    • Optimize storage and indexing to manage increased data ingestion efficiently.

    • Monitor and fine-tune network bandwidth and input/output (I/O) performance to prevent resource contention.

    See the Ingest dashboard documentation for metrics to monitor.

  2. Reducing Query Time:

    • Implement query optimization techniques, such as caching and index tuning, to reduce latency.

    • Scale compute resources dedicated to query processing, such as increasing the number of query nodes.

    • Identify and rewrite inefficient queries to minimize execution time.

    See the Search dashboard documentation for metrics to monitor.

  3. Making Dashboards Responsive:

    • Optimize backend query execution for dashboard data sources to ensure responsiveness under load.

    • Simplify or pre-aggregate data for dashboards that require frequent updates.

    • Use dedicated resources for rendering dashboards to avoid contention with other workloads.

  4. Increasing Data Retention Period:

    • Expand storage infrastructure to handle additional data, such as by adding nodes or using more efficient storage tiers.

    • Introduce policies for tiered data storage (hot, warm, cold) to balance performance and cost.

    • Optimize archiving and rehydration processes to quickly retrieve older data when necessary.

    See the Hosts dashboard documentation for metrics to monitor for primary and secondary storage. Also, see the Bucket storage dashboard documentation for metrics to monitor related to bucket storage.

  5. Onboarding New Data Sources:

    • Implement flexible ingestion pipelines that can quickly adapt to new formats or protocols.

    • Automate schema recognition and parsing to streamline data onboarding.

    • Test and validate ingestion performance for new sources to ensure they don't disrupt existing workloads.

    See the Segments and data sources dashboard documentation for metrics to monitor.

  6. Expanding User Base:

    • Introduce user quotas and priorities to ensure fair resource allocation during peak usage.

    • Enhance cluster capacity to support more simultaneous queries and maintain performance.

    • Provide role-based access control and auditing to manage security for an expanded user base.

    You can read more about users and roles in the Manage users & permissions documentation.

  7. Handling Burst Traffic:

    • Design auto-scaling mechanisms to dynamically allocate resources based on real-time load.

    • Pre-allocate buffer capacity to manage sudden spikes in ingestion or query demand.

    • Monitor and mitigate potential hotspots or single points of failure during bursts.

    See the Overview dashboard documentation for metrics to monitor. The Hosts dashboard documentation lists metrics you can monitor including network traffic.

  8. Improving High-Availability and Fault Tolerance:

    • Implement multi-zone or multi-region deployments to prevent data loss or downtime.

    • Regularly test disaster recovery procedures to validate resilience.

    • Use replication and distributed consensus mechanisms to maintain data integrity during failures.

    You can read more about the part played by replication in the Data Replication and High Availability documentation.

  9. Integrating Machine Learning or Advanced Analytics:

    • Pre-process and transform data to make it ML-ready, such as by normalizing logs or extracting features.

    • Offload heavy computation to specialized resources or external tools to minimize impact on core systems.

    • Integrate real-time analytics pipelines for use cases like anomaly detection and trend prediction.

  10. Optimizing for Cost Efficiency:

    • Migrate infrequently accessed data to cost-effective storage tiers, such as object storage.

    • Consolidate workloads to reduce underutilized resources and improve efficiency.

    • Implement fine-grained monitoring to identify and eliminate costly inefficiencies.

    You can check your usage by clicking on your profile picture in LogScale and then selecting Organization settings then Usage. Use the humio/insights package to view metrics, or create your own custom dashboards and widgets.

  11. Compliance with Regional Data Regulations:

    • Set up data isolation mechanisms to ensure logs from specific regions remain compliant with local laws.

    • Automate compliance reporting and audit trails to simplify adherence to regulatory requirements.

    • Leverage encryption and masking tools to protect sensitive data across jurisdictions.

    You can use data rentention capabilities to ensure compliance with local laws. You can also read about encryption of bucket data.

  12. Supporting Real-Time Monitoring Use Cases:

    • Introduce stream processing for near-instantaneous data ingestion and transformation.

    • Set up real-time alerting pipelines for detecting and responding to critical events.

    • Minimize delays in indexing to ensure newly ingested data is available for querying immediately.

  13. Scaling for Incident Response:

    • Enable dedicated resources for high-intensity queries during incident investigations.

    • Pre-load relevant indices and enrichments to accelerate root cause analysis.

    • Provide pre-configured dashboards and templates tailored for security incidents.

  14. Enabling Large-Scale Historical Analysis:

    • Implement time-partitioned storage and indexing to improve query performance for older data.

    • Enable parallel query execution for large datasets to reduce response times.

    • Use data summarization and roll-up techniques for trend analysis across large time spans.

  15. Cross-Cluster Federated Queries:

    • Optimize inter-cluster communication to minimize data transfer latency.

    • Implement unified query interfaces to simplify querying across multiple clusters.

    • Balance workloads between clusters to avoid overloading individual systems during federated queries.

  16. Expanding to Edge or Hybrid Environments:

    • Set up lightweight nodes for edge environments to enable localized data processing.

    • Use hybrid data pipelines that seamlessly integrate edge, on-premises, and cloud systems.

    • Implement synchronization mechanisms to ensure consistency between edge and central clusters.