Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion vs Elastic Agent

Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion is a managed, serverless service that streams logs, metrics, and traces to OpenSearch Service domains or OpenSearch Serverless collections. Each pipeline has a source, optional ordered processors, and one or more sinks, including another pipeline as a sink. Processing can filter, enrich, transform, normalize, aggregate, and route structured or unstructured data, including textual, numerical, and geospatial content. AWS automatically scales ingestion workloads and manages installation, patching, version upgrades, continuous monitoring, and repair. Users define YAML pipelines through the AWS Console or CLI, set minimum and maximum ingestion OCU capacity, or pause a pipeline; paused pipelines consume no OCUs. Billing is hourly with per-minute granularity for allocated OCUs, with one OCU providing 15 GB RAM and 2 vCPU. Private connectivity is available through VPC access and PrivateLink, or pipelines can use the public internet. Redaction, obfuscation, conditional routing, and a stated 99.9% availability SLA are included.

Elastic Agent collects logs, metrics, traces, availability, security, and other host data through one agent. Fleet supplies a web interface for centrally adding and managing agents and integrations, and can distribute upgrades and policies across thousands of agents at runtime. Administrators can track agent status, configuration, overhead, processes, and versions. Elastic Agent and Fleet include dashboards, visualizations, and ingest pipelines for popular services and platforms, with more than 300 ready-to-use integrations listed across search, security, observability, and cloud providers. Packages are provided for Linux, Windows, and macOS architectures and include a separate otelcol binary for OpenTelemetry Collector components. Elastic describes use across infrastructure, applications, and mobile-device telemetry. Elastic Cloud offers a free 14-day trial with one hosted deployment and three Serverless projects. Trial hosted deployments are limited to one active deployment, 4 GB RAM per availability zone for Elasticsearch data nodes, and up to two availability zones. Elastic directs users to documentation and its community forum for assistance. Paid tiers listed are Standard at $99 a month, Gold at $114 a month, Platinum at $131 a month, and Enterprise at $184 a month.