OpenSearch UI has been adopted by thousands of customers for various use cases since its launch in November 2024. Exciting customer stories and feedback have helped shape our feature improvements. As we complete 6 months since its general availability, we are sharing major enhancements that have improved OpenSearch UI’s capability, especially in observability and security analytics, in this post.
OpenSearch UI is a serverless, fully managed dashboard to provide a scalable, zero-downtime, web-based interface for data analytics and visualizations. With OpenSearch UI, you can have a unified interface to gain actionable insights across multiple data sources, including Amazon OpenSearch Service domains, Amazon OpenSearch Serverless collections, and AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Security Lake.
Use natural language for your AI-powered analytics with Amazon Q Developer
OpenSearch UI has transformed complex data analysis to be as simple as asking questions in natural language with its integration with Amazon Q Developer in OpenSearch. You can access the conversational chat pane by choosing the Amazon Q Developer icon in the top right corner of the UI. Amazon Q Developer will answer generic questions such as how to use the features in OpenSearch UI and how to use OpenSearch UI with additional data sources.
You can use the search bar on the Discover page to use the generative AI capabilities with your OpenSearch data. You can enter your question about your data in natural language. The query assistant feature will translate your question to Piped Processing Language (PPL), run the query, and show the results. There will also be an Amazon Q Summary section generated from the query results to answer your question. The query assistant feature now also works with data connections from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Additionally, you can use the generative AI feature for anomaly detection and visualizations for your data, so it’s straightforward to identify potential issues earlier and faster, reducing the mean time to resolution.
When an alert is triggered, you can choose the Amazon Q icon to generate a summary of the alert, so you can catch up on the context of this alert. The View insights button will provide further analysis of the alerts in combination with OpenSearch knowledge through a process called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). If you want to further investigate the alert, you can choose View in Discover to proceed to log analytics.
Amazon Q Developer in OpenSearch Service will help you reduce troubleshooting time, resolve more issues without escalation, and extract actionable insights from your operational data using natural language instead of specialized queries. Refer to Amazon Q Developer in Amazon OpenSearch Service to get started with the AI assisted analytics experience.
Enhance enterprise security
We have improved OpenSearch UI’s security capability to meet the demanding needs of large enterprises. Through these enhancements, we’re making it seamless to manage secure access at scale so you can have precise control over who can access your analytics workspaces and data that resides in them.
Use SAML workflows through IAM federation
OpenSearch UI now supports Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) federation so that you can create a single sign-on (SSO) experience for your end-users that initiates authentication workflows from your external identity providers (IdPs), typically called IdP-initiated SSO. You might find this process familiar if your organization is using external IdPs (such as Okta) to manage user permissions and track user activities in accessing AWS services. You can now define a default relay state URL to share with your end-users with this support. Your end-users can use this URL to land directly in OpenSearch UI after authenticating with their IdP. You can also achieve fine-grained access control by defining different permissions for each IAM role assumed by different end-users. To get started, refer to Enabling SAML federation with AWS Identity and Access Management.
Secure access with AWS PrivateLink
OpenSearch UI now supports AWS PrivateLink. You can now access OpenSearch UI privately from within your virtual private cloud (VPC). To learn more, see Managing access to the OpenSearch UI from a VPC endpoint.
Enhancing workspace privacy
There are also new workspace-level privacy settings, so you can quickly configure your workspace with the right permissions with collaborators. For more details, refer to Using Amazon OpenSearch Service workspaces.
Expanded data access capabilities
OpenSearch UI now also offers following additional data access capabilities.
Support for cross-cluster search
Cross-cluster search is an OpenSearch feature with which you can query multiple connected OpenSearch Service domains across accounts and across AWS Regions. We added the capability to support these connected domains as data sources in OpenSearch UI. With this support, you can view remote connected clusters with an index pattern under the data source for the source cluster. To learn more, see Cross-Region and cross-account data access with cross-cluster search.
Regional expansion
To further expand the data access capabilities of OpenSearch UI, we expanded its availability to two more regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) and Europe (Stockholm).
Conclusion
The past 6 months after general availability of OpenSearch UI have seen significant progress in making OpenSearch UI more user-friendly, more available, and more secure. From natural language-based exploration to enterprise security, these feature enhancements reflect our commitment to simplify and improve your data analytics experience. To learn more, refer to Using OpenSearch UI in Amazon OpenSearch Service and get updates through Amazon OpenSearch Service user interface release history.
About the Authors
Muthu Pitchaimani is a Search Specialist with Amazon OpenSearch Service. He builds large-scale search applications and solutions. Muthu is interested in the topics of networking and security, and is based out of Austin, Texas.
Hang (Arthur) Zuo is a Senior Product Manager with Amazon OpenSearch Service. Arthur leads generative AI, workspaces, and infrastructural features in OpenSearch UI. Arthur is passionate about cloud technologies and building data products that help users and businesses gain actionable insights and achieve operational excellence.