Cliffhanger Solutions is an application and service provider for the utility and telecom industry. It helps customers and utility companies with preventative maintenance and reducing outage restoration times.
"At Cliffhanger Solutions, we index data in real time from various sources using Elasticsearch and Logstash. Sources include GPS location data from maintenance trucks or from tablets running our app, readings from smart meters and facility data from GIS (geographical information systems)."
Kibana dashboard at Cliffhanger
Operators can now quickly get answers to questions such as "Can I safely close this switch and restore power to these 1500 customers?" or "A storm is coming in from the South, how fast can I get my bucket trucks to the area where the storm will hit?" As for preventative maintenance, engineers can seek answers to questions such as "Transformers from vendor X have a higher than average MTBF (mean time between failures). Find all of them and sort them by installation date, then send them to the work order system for inspection or replacement." While it might not sound like a big deal, this is actually pretty incredible, and this wasn't possible until now without a heavy investments in consultancy or getting locked in with the few one stop shop large vendors that offer a total solution. As we can see at https://www.elastic.co/blog/using-elk-to-keep-the-lights-on:
"Cliffhanger Solutions is a small company, but the flexibility of Elasticsearch allowed us to focus on creating value for our customers instead of getting stuck in maintaining different systems for different clients. And our clients are getting it as well. For example, we serve a tiny utility on a Caribbean island, with only 1 guy in the IT department. By using ATLAS (+Kibana) out of the box, we built them a dashboard to show them outages on a map, color coded by customer density. This would never have been possible even a few years ago. The ELK stack is pretty incredible at making data searchable even if the source data is not clearly defined. Unlike traditional databases you don't need to know your questions in advance, you can explore and find correlations you didn't even know existed. It reduces a lot of overhead.
Internally, at the Cliffhanger office, we use the ELK stack to monitor the status of our clients' applications. We use it to improve search relevance, performance, find errors and prevent hack attacks. We share this data with our clients. They like this level of transparency and it gives them confidence that their data is safe."
Refer to https://www.elastic.co/blog/using-elk-to-keep-the-lights-on.