quickwit

Quickwit is a cloud-native, open-source search engine designed for observability use cases, including log management and distributed tracing, with metrics support on the roadmap. It is built to deliver sub-second search performance directly on cloud storage such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage, by decoupling compute and storage and using stateless indexers and searchers. Key features include full-text search and aggregation queries, an Elasticsearch-compatible API that works with existing Elasticsearch or OpenSearch clients, native support for Jaeger and OpenTelemetry (OTEL) for logs and traces, schemaless or strict schema indexing, and a RESTful API. It also offers enterprise-ready capabilities such as multiple data sources (Kafka, Kinesis, Pulsar), multi-tenancy, retention policies, delete tasks for GDPR compliance, and high availability for search (and for indexing with Kafka). Quickwit is designed to be significantly more cost-effective than traditional search engines like Elasticsearch, with estimates of up to 10x lower average cost. It is Kubernetes-ready with a Helm chart and provides a Grafana data source plugin. The project is open-source under the Apache License 2.0 and welcomes contributions from the community.