Elastic has launched a rebuilt metrics engine in Elastic Observability featuring columnar storage, native Prometheus/PromQL support, and unified logs, metrics, and traces on one platform. The new engine achieves 3.75 bytes per data point for OpenTelemetry metrics (down from 25 bytes), queries up to 160x faster than earlier TSDS versions, and pricing at 25% of the standard per-GB rate. The post targets public sector IT teams facing budget accountability, compliance mandates, and strict data residency requirements, arguing that the platform eliminates the traditional tradeoff between observability coverage and cost. Deployment options include Elastic Cloud Serverless, hosted, and fully air-gapped on-premises environments, with FedRAMP Moderate and High authorization on AWS GovCloud. A CLI-driven migration tool translates existing Grafana and Datadog dashboards and alerts into Kibana-native outputs.
