Ofcourse it is not meant as a primary database. What baffles me is that people use it as log storage. As an application scales, storage and querying logs become the bottleneck if elasticsearch is used. I was dealing with a system that could afford only 1 week of log retention!

Logs are always notoriously expensive to store and also are notorious for accidentally exposing PII, API/private/db keys, etc. They should generally only be stored for a relatively short period of time at scale. In fact, to remain compliant to CCPA, 28 days is the safe number for most things.

Metrics are much more efficient and are the tool of choice for longer term storage and debugging.