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Evaluate Elastic during a trial

Serverless ECH

To make the most of your free 14-day Elastic Cloud trial, set up high-value use cases, explore the most powerful Elastic features, and gather the evidence you need to determine whether Elastic is the right choice for your organization.

Ingest real data and validate the capabilities that will save you time, reduce costs, and prevent operational challenges in production.

By the end of this guide, you'll know how to structure your trial, make strategic Elastic product decisions, and measure success so you can build a meaningful proof of concept (PoC).

For a quick intro, start by learning more about Elastic Cloud.

Your Elastic Cloud trial gives you full access to explore the following features and capabilities:

  • All features available in the Search, Observability, and Security solutions, depending on your choice of deployment and project type.
  • Access to the following:
    • Integrations to ingest your data using the simplest method that meets your use case.
    • Machine learning features to evaluate anomaly detection results, search relevance, and explore visualization tools from our trained models.
    • Advanced analytics to test Elasticsearch as a vector database for building modern GenAI and semantic search applications.
Tip

If you prefer to set up Elasticsearch and Kibana in Docker for local development or testing, refer to Local development installation (quickstart). By default, new installations have a Basic license that never expires. To explore all the available solutions and features, start a 30-day free trial by following the instructions in Manage your license in a self-managed cluster.

During the free 14-day trial, Elastic provides access to one hosted deployment and three Serverless projects. If all you want to do is try out Elastic, the trial includes more than enough to get you started. During the trial period, some limitations apply.

Hosted deployments

  • You can only have one active deployment at a time.
  • The deployment size is limited to 8GB RAM and approximately 360GB of storage, depending on the specified hardware profile.
  • Machine learning nodes are available up to 4GB RAM, or up to 8GB when using Reranker.
  • Custom Elasticsearch plugins are not enabled.
  • We monitor token usage per account for the Elastic Managed LLM. If an account uses over one million tokens in 24 hours, we will inform you, then remove access to the LLM. This is in accordance with our fair use policy for trials.

Serverless projects

  • You can have three active Serverless projects at a time.
  • Search Power is limited to 100 and Search Boost Window is limited to 7 days. These settings apply only to Elasticsearch Serverless projects.
  • Scaling is limited for Serverless projects in trials. Failures might occur if the workload requires memory or compute beyond what the above search power and search boost window setting limits can provide.
  • We monitor token usage per account for the Elastic Managed LLM. If an account uses over one million tokens in 24 hours, we will inform, then remove access to the LLM. This is in accordance with our fair use policy for trials.

A successful trial starts with clarity about what you want to achieve. Three foundational decisions shape your trial: defining your trial goal, identifying your primary use case, and choosing the deployment type that best supports it.

To achieve the best results, clarify what success looks like for your trial.

Consider the following questions:

  • What is the main problem you're trying to solve? Examples: slow root-cause analysis, rising infrastructure costs, missing search relevance, or too many disconnected data sources.
  • If you choose to move forward, which team will use Elastic?
  • What would a successful PoC show? Faster investigations? Better visibility? Reduced spend?
  • Have you identified the KPIs or metrics that matter most? Examples: time to detect, ingestion speed, relevance scores, or dashboard load times.

Document your trial goal now. This clarity will guide your use case selection and help you measure success at the end of your trial.

With your trial goal in mind, identify which Elastic solution best addresses your challenge. Elastic can support many workloads, but a focused trial generates more precise results. You can always expand to additional use cases after establishing initial success.

Your challenge Primary use case
Users struggle to find relevant information across systems Search
Build your first search application Search
Limited visibility into application performance or system health Observability
Slow incident response and troubleshooting Observability
Identify unknown unknowns through logs, traces, and metrics Observability
Detect and respond to endpoint security threats Security
Security logs are difficult to analyze or correlate Security
Compliance requires centralized security monitoring Security

Once you know what you want to evaluate, choose the deployment option that best supports your goals. Elastic offers two primary deployment options on Elastic Cloud.

  • Fully managed with automatic scaling.
  • Simplified configuration and maintenance.
  • Project-based organization (Search, Observability, or Security).
  • Ideal for fast setup and focused trials of a single use case.
  • Access to all solutions in a single deployment.
  • More control over cluster configuration and sizing.
  • Traditional Elasticsearch architecture.
  • Best for evaluating multiple use cases together or when you need specific configuration options.
Tip

For most trials, Serverless provides the fastest path to demonstrating value. You can always explore hosted options later or migrate to production with different requirements.

For detailed comparisons, refer to:

With your trial goal defined, follow this framework to build a PoC that demonstrates clear value and helps you make an informed decision about adopting Elastic.

  • Reduce time to find information by X%.
  • Index and search Y documents with sub-second response times.
  • Demonstrate relevance tuning for domain-specific searches.
  • Reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) incidents by X minutes.
  • Gain visibility into application performance across Y services.
  • Centralize logs from Z disparate systems.
  • Detect X types of threats that current tools miss.
  • Reduce investigation time by Y%.
  • Demonstrate compliance reporting for Z requirements.

To build a meaningful PoC, you need real-world data and not just sample datasets.

  • Results are more trustworthy for stakeholders.
  • Dashboards and alerts reflect real use cases.
  • Search and relevance testing becomes meaningful.
  • Performance benchmarks are accurate.

Start with a minimal dataset if needed, then expand.

Once data is flowing, use the trial to validate the features that will determine long-term adoption. Take notes on what works well and where follow-up questions might be needed.

Feature Why it matters How to try it
Vector search and hybrid search Combine semantic understanding with keyword precision Semantic search quickstart
Relevance tuning Ensure users find the most relevant results Query rules
Search analytics Understand what users search for and what they find Search relevance
Performance at scale Validate response times with production-like volumes Index a representative dataset and benchmark queries
Feature Why it matters How to try it
Log, metric, and trace correlation Get full-stack visibility in one place Correlate data in the Applications UI
APM instrumentation Identify slow transactions and errors APM quickstart
Dashboards and alerts Monitor SLOs and respond to incidents Create custom threshold alerts
Machine learning anomaly detection Automatically detect latency, throughput, and error anomalies Enable anomaly detection
Feature Why it matters How to try it
Prebuilt detection rules Detect threats without writing custom rules Enable detection rules
Dashboards Get useful visualizations of your environment, or create your own custom visualization Security dashboards
Endpoint protection Prevent malware and ransomware Configure Elastic Defend
Timeline Investigate threats in chronological order in an interactive workspace Investigate with Timeline
Threat intelligence Enrich alerts with threat context Threat intelligence integrations

A strong PoC is essential for a good trial. Keep it simple but meaningful.

Your PoC should:

  • Address the priority problem you identified in your trial goal.
  • Include dashboards, searches, or workflows that matter to your teams.
  • Show how Elastic improves speed, accuracy, or cost.
  • Prove that Elastic can scale with your use case.
  • Include metrics that stakeholders can quickly understand.

Suggested PoC deliverables:

  • A short summary of your trial goal.
  • A live dashboard or search interface.
  • Example alerts or detections.
  • Performance benchmarks or response time comparisons.
  • A brief explanation of how Elastic handled your real data.

Track:

  • Time to ingest data.
  • Performance and query speed.
  • Feature coverage for your use case.
  • Ease of use for developers and analysts.

Save:

  • Screenshots of dashboards.
  • Queries and scripts you tested.
  • Notes on what worked well and what was missing.

Most trials run for two weeks. Here's a suggested approach to maximize your trial.

For the first week, focus on the following activities:

  • Set up your deployment or project.
  • Connect your first data sources.
  • Demonstrate basic capabilities.
  • Validate that Elastic can address your use case.

We recommend the following activities for each use case:

Follow the steps in Get started with Elasticsearch, which include:

  1. Identify your search goals.
  2. Ingest sample data or connect a data source.
  3. Build basic search queries and test relevance.

For targeted learning paths, go to Elasticsearch quickstarts. In particular, Index and search basics and Semantic search.

  1. Review the Observability getting started guide.
  2. Deploy Elastic Agent to monitor 1-2 hosts or services.
  3. Collect logs from a critical application.
  4. Explore metrics and logs in Kibana.
  1. Review the Security getting started guide.
  2. Ingest security data from your environment.
  3. Deploy Elastic Defend to protect critical endpoints.
  4. Enable prebuilt detection rules.
  5. Investigate sample security events or anomalous activity.

For targeted learning paths, go to Elastic Security quickstarts.

The following resources are recommended for all use cases:

For the second week, focus on the following activities:

  • Add a few additional data sources relevant to your use case. Refer to Fleet integrations for available integrations.
  • Focus on metrics that demonstrate clear business value. Use Lens visualizations to highlight KPIs.
  • Set up alerts for critical conditions or thresholds. Refer to Alerting for configuration options.
  • Create dashboards that answer key stakeholder questions. Refer to Create a dashboard for guidance.
  • Compare results against your success criteria.
  • Quantify time savings, efficiency gains, or risk reduction.

When you're ready to move beyond your trial into production:

  1. Based on your PoC, determine production sizing needs. Refer to Production guidance.
  2. Review license documentation to choose the right tier, and billing documentation to understand costs.
  3. If moving from trial to production, plan data migration and configuration transfer. Use Snapshot and restore to preserve your work.
  4. Contact Elastic Sales to discuss your trial results and production requirements.

To retain your Elastic Cloud Hosted deployment or Serverless project, refer to Remove trial limitations and Maintain access to your trial projects and data.

Tip

Depending on your organization's needs, you might want to evaluate different deployment options. Elastic offers multiple deployment types, including Elastic Cloud Enterprise and Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes. Explore the deployment options to find the best fit for your infrastructure.

After proving value with one use case:

  • Consider additional solutions, such as Observability + Security.
  • Add data sources and integrations.
  • Implement additional features such as machine learning, custom applications, and more.
  • Onboard additional users in your organization.

Continue exploring Elastic's capabilities: