01
Emergency Incident Response
Ingest stalled, queues filling, dashboards down, or shippers silently not delivering. A senior engineer joins a live bridge within 15 minutes with access to diagnose — not a ticket acknowledgement.
ELK Stack Support
24/7 ELK Stack Support with a 15-Minute Emergency SLA
Last reviewed by Scott Sternloff
AceMQ supports the ingest and visualisation layers of the Elastic Stack — Logstash pipelines under backpressure, grok patterns burning CPU, Beats that stop shipping, index templates and ILM policies that never applied, and Kibana dashboards that time out. For cluster-layer problems, see our Elasticsearch support. Every ticket reaches a named senior engineer.
Support quotes answered within 1 hour, by a senior engineer.
- min emergency SLA
- 15
- across Americas, EMEA, APAC
- 24/7
- enterprise customers
- 160+
- countries served
- 26+
Planning a build, upgrade or migration instead? See AceMQ ELK Stack consulting and services.
Customers
Partners
Incident Triage
ELK Stack problems we fix every week
These are real symptoms from real ELK Stack production environments — and the first thing our engineers check when one comes in.
| Symptom you're seeing | What we check first | Typical resolution |
|---|---|---|
| Logstash persistent queue growing on disk, events arriving late | Whether the block is downstream or in the filter stage — output response times and the pipeline's filter duration from the node stats API. A persistent queue filling means the pipeline cannot drain as fast as it fills, and the queue is the symptom rather than the cause. | 1–2 hours |
| Logstash pinning every CPU core with modest event throughput | The grok patterns in the filter chain for catastrophic backtracking. A pattern with nested quantifiers or greedy matches over a line that does not match can consume enormous CPU on a single event. We find the offending pattern by disabling filters in halves before rewriting it with anchors and dissect where possible. | 2–4 hours |
| A Filebeat host stopped shipping but the service is running | The registry file and harvester state. A corrupted or reset registry, a file rotation the harvester lost track of, or hitting harvester_limit on a host with thousands of log files all produce a running agent that ships nothing. | Under 1 hour |
| Kibana dashboard times out or loads for minutes | How many indices each visualisation resolves against. A wildcard index pattern spanning years of daily indices forces every panel to query hundreds of shards. We count the resolved shards per panel before assuming the cluster is undersized. | 1–2 hours |
| New indices have wrong field mappings — fields are text, not keyword | Index template priority and pattern match order against the index name actually created. A composable template that does not match, or a lower priority than a competing template, silently leaves dynamic mapping to guess the types. | 1–3 hours |
| ILM is not rolling over indices — disk filling with hot data | The ILM explain output for the index. The usual causes are an index created without the rollover alias, a policy attached after creation, or a step erroring silently. The explain API names the step it is stuck on. | 1–2 hours |
| Every document is being processed twice or enriched twice | Whether an ingest pipeline on the Elasticsearch side is duplicating work already done in Logstash. Estates that adopted Elastic Agent or Beats modules alongside an existing Logstash pipeline commonly end up with both parsing the same events. | 2–4 hours |
| Timestamps wrong — events appear hours off or all at ingest time | The date filter and its timezone handling against the source format, then whether @timestamp is being overwritten downstream. Logs without an explicit offset default to the processing node's timezone, which differs between your Logstash hosts and your laptop. | Same day |
Resolution times reflect typical ELK Stack engagements under an active AceMQ support contract. Every P1 closes with a written root-cause analysis.
What's Included
Everything in your ELK Stack support contract
No add-on pricing for incidents. No per-ticket charges. One contract covers the whole surface.
- 02
Logstash Pipeline Engineering
Filter chain profiling, grok rewrite and dissect migration, worker and batch sizing, persistent queue configuration, and multi-pipeline design so one noisy source cannot stall every other input.
- 03
Beats & Agent Fleet Operations
Filebeat, Metricbeat, and Elastic Agent deployment at scale — registry and harvester behaviour, module configuration, backpressure handling, and fleet policy management across large host estates.
- 04
Index Templates, Mappings & ILM
Composable template design and priority, mapping and field type control, data stream adoption, and ILM policies that actually roll over — so retention and storage behave the way the policy says they do.
- 05
Kibana Dashboard Performance
Index pattern scoping, panel query cost, runtime field usage, and dashboard design that resolves against the indices it needs rather than every index you have ever created.
- 06
Pipeline Architecture & Migration
Deciding what belongs in Logstash, in Elasticsearch ingest pipelines, or at the edge in Beats — plus buffering with Kafka or Redis in front of Logstash, and migration off ELK where that is the right call.
Why AceMQ
What you get that you don't get elsewhere
We Fix the Pipeline, Not Just the Cluster
Most ELK pain lives before the data lands — grok cost, queue backpressure, shippers that stop, mappings applied too late. That is the layer we work at, alongside our Elasticsearch cluster support when the problem is downstream.
Named Engineers, Zero Cold Start
The same senior engineers stay on your account. They know your pipelines, your sourcetypes, and your index layout — so a P1 call starts with diagnosis, not twenty minutes of you explaining your ingest path.
No Tier-1 Triage Layer
You reach a senior engineer directly by phone, email, or Slack. No help desk collecting information to pass along, and no escalation approval standing between you and someone who can actually fix it.
Deep on the Buffer in Front of Logstash
Serious ELK pipelines put Kafka or Redis between the shippers and Logstash. Messaging is our core discipline, so partitioning, consumer lag, retention, and replay are home ground rather than adjacent knowledge.
Genuine Follow-the-Sun Coverage
Engineers across 26+ countries and every time zone. Your 3am incident is someone's mid-afternoon — no overnight skeleton crew, no waiting for a region to wake up.
Proactive, Not Just Reactive
Quarterly reviews of ingest volume, pipeline CPU cost, mapping explosion risk, and ILM effectiveness — plus alerts on version-specific issues affecting the exact releases you run.
We support ELK Stack wherever it's deployed
Cloud, Kubernetes, bare metal, hybrid, and air-gapped — including environments where you can't give us outbound network access.
- Logstash 7.x & 8.x
- Filebeat, Metricbeat & Elastic Agent
- Kibana 7.x & 8.x
- Elastic Cloud
- Self-managed Elastic Stack
- Kubernetes & OpenShift (ECK)
- AWS (EC2, EKS)
- Microsoft Azure (AKS)
- Google Cloud (GKE)
- Kafka or Redis buffered pipelines
- Bare metal & on-premise
- Air-gapped / no outbound access
Escalation Path
Your first hour of an ELK Stack outage
Every tier reaches a senior ELK Stack engineer. There is no tier-1 triage layer to get through.
- 15 minfirst responseEmergencyProduction down, messages not flowing, queue manager failure
- 1 hourfirst responseCriticalSevere degradation, high error rates, approaching capacity
- 4 hoursfirst responseHighPerformance issues, configuration problems, non-critical failures
- Next Dayfirst responseStandardQuestions, guidance, best practices, non-urgent improvements
P1 escalation path
A replay of one P1, from the first page to the written root-cause analysis
T+Elapsed15:00
15-minute P1 response, 24/7.
A response time, not a resolution time.
- T+00:00Paged
P1 opened, on-call engineer paged
Phone, email or Slack reaches the on-call senior engineer directly, whether the incident is in RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL or Kubernetes. No web form, no tier-1 queue.
- T+15:00Live
Senior engineer on your bridge
A senior engineer who already knows your environment joins a live bridge, so nobody has to re-explain your topology.
- T+30:00If needed
Specialists across the stack join
When an incident crosses components, the engineers who know each one join. For RabbitMQ, the path runs to the core team.
- AfterEvery P1
Written root-cause analysis
Root cause, the fix applied and the prevention steps, delivered after every P1.
Pricing
What does AceMQ ELK Stack support cost?
AceMQ ELK Stack support contracts typically run $24,000–72,000 a year, depending on SLA level, scope (number of clusters or nodes, and environments) and deployment (self-managed, cloud-managed or Kubernetes).
| What moves the price | How it changes the contract |
|---|---|
| SLA level | Business-hours cover costs less than 24/7 cover with a 15-minute emergency response. |
| Scope | More clusters or nodes, and more environments, make a larger contract. |
| Deployment | Self-managed, cloud-managed and Kubernetes estates need different amounts of hands-on work. |
Covering several technologies under one contract, for example RabbitMQ, Kafka and Redis, earns an aggressive discount.
Support In Practice
ELK Stack problems we've already solved
ELK Stack support and remediation work from AceMQ. Each card links to the full write-up: the pipeline, what AceMQ diagnosed or changed, and the result.
ELK Stack Logstash Back-Pressure Remediation
Energy Utility Operator
Remediation of an ELK pipeline where Logstash back-pressure stalled Beats agents and left log gaps across the fleet.
ELK StackLogstash
ElasticsearchFilebeatELK Stack Pipeline and Ingest Support
Global Logistics Provider
Ongoing support across the full ELK ingest path — Beats, Logstash, ingest pipelines, and index templates — with 24/7 coverage.
ELK StackLogstashElasticsearchKibanaFilebeatELK Stack Log Volume and Retention Assessment
Insurance Services Provider
Assessment of log volume, field-level utility, and retention across an ELK estate where storage growth had outpaced any plan for it.
ELK StackElasticsearchKibanaLogstashELK Stack Pipeline Architecture Redesign
Digital Commerce Platform
Consulting engagement to redesign an ELK ingest architecture around buffered queues, ingest node pipelines, and schema standardization.
ELK StackLogstash
KafkaElasticsearch
Kubernetes
Support options
Four tiers of ELK Stack support.
AceMQ offers ELK Stack support in four tiers, each handing more of the day-to-day work to AceMQ: 24/7 support and incident management for pipelines your team runs, proactive monitoring that catches grok cost, queue growth and ILM problems first, managed ELK on your own infrastructure, and fully managed ELK on AceMQ infrastructure. Logstash, Kibana and Beats 7.x and 8.x are covered in all four.
- Tier 1
ELK Stack 24/7 Support & Incident Management
You run it, we back you up
- A live bridge in 15 minutes, 24/7, for stalled ingest and missing logs
- Diagnosis from Logstash node stats, Beats registry state and ILM explain
- One team across the pipeline and the cluster, so an incident is not split
Best for: Teams that run an ELK pipeline themselves and need senior cover when logs stop arriving mid-incident.
- Tier 2
ELK Stack 24/7 Support with Proactive Monitoring
You run it, we watch it with you
- Scheduled reviews of parse failures, grok cost, queue depth and timestamps
- Index template priority, mapping and ILM rollover checks
- Kibana space, role and dashboard scope reviews
Best for: Estates where a silent parse failure or a late log is not an acceptable surprise during an incident.
- Tier 3
Managed ELK Stack on Your Infrastructure
We run it in your cloud or data centre
- 24/7 monitoring from shipper to dashboard, including queue depth and ingest lag
- Fleet policy management and version upgrades across large host estates
- ILM, retention and index template maintenance
Best for: Regulated estates that must keep log data inside their own boundary.
- Tier 4
Fully Managed ELK Stack on AceMQ Infrastructure
We host it and run it, as a service
- Log sources onboarded to a governed pipeline, with a buffer ahead of Logstash
- Parsing changes tested on captured samples before release
- Retention and storage growth managed against the policy you set
Best for: Teams that want searchable logs without running Logstash and a cluster, and do not need them in their own account.
| Who does what | Tier 1 24/7 support | Tier 2 Proactive monitoring | Tier 3 Managed, your infrastructure | Tier 4 Fully managed by AceMQ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs ELK Stack day to day? | Your team | Your team, with AceMQ reviews | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Where does it run? | Your infrastructure | Your infrastructure | Your cloud account or data centre | AceMQ infrastructure |
| 24/7 incident response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response |
| Health checks and CVE alerts | On request | Scheduled | Included | Included |
| Patching and upgrades | Your team, AceMQ advises | Planned with AceMQ | Done by AceMQ | Done by AceMQ |
| Monitoring and on-call | Your team | Your team | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Data, keys and accounts | Yours | Yours | Yours | Your data, hosted by AceMQ |
Every Tier can start as an ad hoc engagement or an annual partnership, and you can move up or down a Tier as your team changes.
One partner for ELK Stack
Everything else AceMQ does for ELK Stack.
Support is one part of what AceMQ does for ELK Stack. The same engineers deliver consulting, health checks, migrations and end-of-life cover, and support the systems that usually run next to it.
- ConsultingELK Stack consulting and services
- LifecycleEnd-of-life software support
- Enterprise supportOpen source support across your whole stack
- GuideELK Stack guide
Support for the rest of your stack
Messaging & Streaming
- RabbitMQ supportMessaging & Streaming
- Apache Kafka supportMessaging & Streaming
- IBM MQ supportMessaging & Streaming
- ActiveMQ supportMessaging & Streaming
- Azure Service Bus supportMessaging & Streaming
- Amazon SQS supportMessaging & Streaming
- Google Cloud Pub/Sub supportMessaging & Streaming
- Redpanda supportMessaging & Streaming
- Apache Pulsar supportMessaging & Streaming
- Message Queuing supportMessaging & Streaming
Databases & Caching
Search & Analytics
Lakehouse & Compute
Observability & Monitoring
Data Integration
Cloud & Containers
API Management
See support for all 51 technologiesShow fewer
Related services
What does AceMQ ELK Stack support include?
Our ELK Stack support covers 24/7 emergency incident response with a 15-minute SLA, root cause analysis on every P1, Logstash pipeline engineering, Beats and Elastic Agent fleet operations, index template and ILM design, Kibana dashboard performance work, and pipeline architecture reviews. Every ticket is handled by a named senior engineer assigned to your account — there is no tier-1 triage layer and no per-incident charge.
How does this differ from your Elasticsearch support?
This page covers the pipeline and visualisation layers — Logstash, Beats and Elastic Agent, ingest pipelines, index templates and ILM, and Kibana. Our Elasticsearch support covers the cluster layer: shard allocation, heap and GC, node failures, snapshot and restore, and query performance inside the engine. Most customers need both, and the same named engineers handle them so an incident is not split across two teams.
Why is Logstash saturating CPU when our event rate is not that high?
Nearly always a grok pattern. Grok compiles to regular expressions, and a pattern with nested quantifiers or greedy wildcards can backtrack catastrophically on a line that does not match — a single event can burn a core for seconds. We bisect the filter chain to identify the pattern, then rewrite it with anchored, non-greedy expressions, or replace it with dissect where the format is positional. Dissect is dramatically cheaper and covers more log formats than people expect.
Should we parse in Logstash or in Elasticsearch ingest pipelines?
It depends on what else the data needs. Ingest pipelines run on the cluster's ingest nodes and are simpler to operate, which suits straightforward parsing. Logstash is the right place when you need external enrichment lookups, complex conditional routing, buffering with a persistent queue, or outputs to systems other than Elasticsearch. The failure mode we see most is doing both — an estate that adopted Beats modules or Elastic Agent while keeping an older Logstash pipeline, and now parses everything twice.
Our Filebeat agents show as healthy but no data arrives. What causes that?
Three things account for most cases. The registry file has been corrupted or reset, so Beats has lost its position and its view of which files it has read. A log rotation happened in a way the harvester did not track, and it is holding a deleted inode. Or the host has more log files than harvester_limit allows, so some files are never picked up. The Beats log usually shows the harvester state clearly once you know which of the three to look for.
Can you help when a Kibana dashboard times out?
Yes, and the fix is usually in the dashboard rather than the cluster. The dominant cause is index patterns with broad wildcards that resolve every panel against hundreds or thousands of shards spanning years of data. Narrowing the pattern, adopting data streams, using runtime fields sparingly, and restructuring panels so they query only what they need typically brings load times down by an order of magnitude without adding a single node.
Can we work with AceMQ on ELK Stack without a long contract?
Yes. AceMQ works on ELK Stack in two ways: ad hoc engagements for a defined piece of work, such as a health check, an upgrade or an incident, or an annual partner engagement that covers 24/7 support, proactive reviews and named engineers. Many teams start ad hoc and move to an annual partnership once the first engagement is done.
How much does AceMQ ELK Stack support or consulting cost?
Every AceMQ proposal is tailored to your requirements: your ELK Stack environment, the SLA you need, the hours of cover and the scope of work. Most contracts run $24,000–72,000 a year, depending on the SLA, the scope and how ELK Stack is deployed, with aggressive discounts when several technologies share one contract. Request a quote and AceMQ replies within 1 hour.
Let's talk
A Stalled Pipeline Means Nobody Can See the Outage
Reactive cover, proactive reviews, or AceMQ running ELK Stack for you on your infrastructure or ours. A senior engineer scopes it with you, and quote requests are answered within 1 hour.
A senior ELK Stack engineer, not a sales queueQuote requests answered within 1 hourAd hoc engagements or an annual partnership
Production incident right now?Email an ELK Stack Architect
Get in Touch
Talk to an ELK Stack Expert
Send us a message and we'll follow up within 1 hour — or book a free 30-min consultation directly.
305-204-2607info@acemq.com66 W. Flagler St. 9th Floor
Miami, FL 33130
Miami, FL 33130
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