Ongoing Support Options

Retainers are the fast path when the system matters and you need priority access, continuity, and trusted help when infrastructure gets weird.

Every ongoing engagement starts with a short kickoff, a shared priority list, and clear expectations about access, response time, meeting cadence, and escalation boundaries.

These are expert advisory and architecture engagements. 24/7 on-call ownership, managed operations, and hands-on implementation are scoped explicitly when needed.

Includes

  • Monthly architecture or risk review
  • Async questions over Slack or email
  • Best-effort response within two business days
  • Review of one proposed change, vendor decision, query pattern, or operational plan per month
  • Light escalation triage when a production issue needs outside judgment

Best Fit

  • Teams with capable engineers who want Staff+ validation
  • Leaders who want continuity without a large monthly commitment
  • Clusters that are mostly stable but still carry meaningful risk

Includes

  • Recurring architecture and roadmap meetings, usually weekly or biweekly
  • Architecture review for Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and observability changes
  • Priority async access with best-effort response within one business day
  • Incident advisory, post-incident review, and remediation planning
  • Vendor and tool guidance across Elastic, OpenSearch, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Fluent Bit, and OpenTelemetry
  • Monthly risk, roadmap, and action-item summary for technical leadership

Best Fit

  • Teams modernizing search or observability over multiple quarters
  • Organizations without a dedicated internal Staff+ search or observability architect
  • Leaders who want recurring independent technical judgment

Includes

  • Active modernization or stabilization work
  • Migration oversight and execution support
  • Priority escalation support during business hours, with emergency expectations scoped explicitly
  • Incident management support, post-incident review, and remediation ownership where agreed
  • Deep involvement in architecture, runbooks, dashboards, alerting, and remediation plans
  • Weekly operating rhythm with a shared backlog, decision log, and executive-friendly progress summary

Best Fit

  • Business-critical clusters or observability systems with recurring incidents
  • Teams facing high-risk migrations, upgrades, or cost-control programs
  • Organizations that need trusted help when things get weird, not just a report

Diagnostic Packages

Fixed-scope reviews are useful when you need a clear diagnosis first. They can stand alone or become the starting point for ongoing support.

These are short, focused engagements. The main client commitment is timely access to configuration, telemetry, representative queries, and the people who know where the pain is.

Includes

  • Cluster topology review
  • Shard sizing analysis
  • Index template evaluation
  • ILM strategy review
  • Heap and JVM configuration review
  • Recovery and failure behavior analysis
  • Slow query, aggregation, and indexing pressure review
  • OpenSearch compatibility and managed-service behavior review when applicable

Deliverables

  • Written assessment report (PDF)
  • Top risks ranked by severity
  • Short-term vs long-term issues
  • Recommended remediation path
  • Performance quick wins vs architectural fixes

Client Commitment

  • 60-minute kickoff to define symptoms, scope, and success criteria
  • Read-only access or exported configuration, metrics, logs, and representative slow queries
  • 60-minute findings review with technical stakeholders

Includes

  • Ingestion analysis
  • Retention review
  • Duplicate log identification
  • High-cardinality field detection
  • Storage tier usage
  • Sampling and filtering review
  • Elastic, OpenSearch, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Fluent Bit, and OpenTelemetry boundary review

Deliverables

  • Estimated monthly savings
  • Prioritized cost reduction actions
  • Safe reduction strategy
  • Before/after projections

Client Commitment

  • 60-minute kickoff to understand cost pressure and retention requirements
  • Access to ingestion volumes, retention policies, index or dataset growth, and billing context
  • 60-minute savings and risk review with engineering or platform leadership

Includes

  • Feature compatibility review
  • Plugin dependency analysis
  • Ingestion pipeline review
  • Data volume and retention analysis
  • Migration risk matrix
  • Phased migration roadmap

Deliverables

  • Migration feasibility report
  • Cost comparison
  • Technical risk assessment
  • Recommended migration path

Client Commitment

  • 60- to 90-minute kickoff covering business drivers, deadlines, and risk tolerance
  • Inventory of clusters, plugins, ingestion paths, data volumes, security constraints, and consumers
  • 90-minute migration path review with technical and business owners

Includes

  • Logs vs metrics vs traces evaluation
  • Prometheus / Elastic boundary definition
  • Ownership and responsibility modeling
  • Growth and scaling projections
  • Failure mode analysis

Deliverables

  • Architecture recommendations
  • Systems behavior risks
  • Long-term scaling strategy
  • Cost containment design

Client Commitment

  • 60- to 90-minute kickoff covering teams, tools, ownership, and incident pain points
  • Access to architecture diagrams, telemetry flows, dashboards, alerts, retention rules, and spend context
  • 90-minute architecture readout with technical leads and stakeholders

Ready to Talk Through Ongoing Support?

Tell us what is slow, unstable, expensive, or risky. We will point you at the right ongoing option, a focused diagnostic package, or tell you if a smaller step is enough.

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Or email cbrown@nosqlrevolution.com