As another year is coming to an end, let's take time to look at what happened in Lucene land in 2019.

Wow, it's finally here! After 25 fantastic articles we've reached the end of the 2019 Elastic Advent series. We've covered Elasticsearch and Python, Auditbeat, ECS, data transform, jvm options, anomaly detector models, Maps, SSL configuration, Smart query cancellation, data transforms, SLM, the new enrich processor, App Search, and so much more. In the topics we've spoken in German, Greek, English, French, Finish, Spanish and Swedish.

Using percentages when performing data analytics is an essential approach to effective numeric comparison, especially when the data in question demonstrates drastically different sample sizes or totals. Percentages allow for a quick and accurate understanding of how much data sums have changed across a dimensional category like a range of time, geographic regions, product lines, etc.

As attackers continue to evolve and advance their techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs), it is crucial for enterprise organizations to deploy necessary countermeasures and defenses to secure their networks. Elastic Security provides an endpoint protection platform (EPP) with some of the most advanced and effective endpoint protections and preventions on the market today.

Tools. As engineers we all love great tools that help our teams work productively, resolve problems faster, be better. But tools can tend to grow in number, require additional maintenance, and most importantly, create silos. Each team has certain responsibilities and is constantly searching for tools that can address specific requirements in the best possible way.

Following the fully featured public beta of the Elasticsearch Service on Microsoft Azure earlier this year, we are pleased to declare it is now generally available! Existing Elasticsearch Service customers can log in and launch deployments on Azure in their existing accounts, and new users can get started with a free 14-day trial of the Elasticsearch Service.

With the addition of new data structures in Lucene 6.0, the Elasticsearch 5.0 release delivered massive indexing and search performance improvements for one-dimension numeric, date, and IP fields, and two-dimension (lat, lon) geo_point fields. Building on this work, the Elasticsearch 6.0 release further improved usability and simplicity of the geo_point API by setting the default indexing structure to the new block k-d tree (BKD) and removing all support for legacy prefix tree encoding.

Software giant Adobe is known the world around for its Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat products, which are rolled into cloud service suites — Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud — of other similar software offerings. A number of their products — especially those where image search is critical, such as Adobe Stock — feature slick search capabilities that use Elasticsearch behind the scenes.

We are happy to announce that Elastic Stack 7.5 brings support for the Azure Monitor service in Metricbeat and Azure activity logs and AD (Active Directory) activity reports in Filebeat.

As part of Elasticsearch 7.5.0, a new ingest processor — named enrich processor — was released. This new processor allows ingest node to enrich documents being ingested with additional data from reference data sets. This opens up a new world of possibilities for ingest nodes.