KMW Technology is a leading provider of Solr consulting and Search Professional Services. For over a decade, KMW Technology has worked with some of the largest names in financial services, life sciences, higher education and IT to resolve their complex search problems and unlock new opportunities. The KMW team brings a wide range of search experience and a deep knowledge of Solr internals to ensure successful projects that bring value to customers.
KMW is now offering a new Search consulting service: The KMW Solr Audit – a quick time to value audit that covers all aspects of a Search Platform in order to realize the maximum value from your Solr deployment. The KMW Solr Audit focuses on quickly resolving pain points, simplifying operations and unlocking new opportunities leveraging our accumulated experience, industry best practices and the latest offerings from the open source community. The KMW Solr Audit is a program for organizations currently running Solr in production but don’t believe they are getting everything they can out of their search platform.
Customer issues addressed by a KMW Solr Audit include:
- Cluster instability
- Query throughput and latency issues
- Relevancy issues / poor recall or precision
- Ingestion / index latency concerns
- Planning for a Solr upgrade or major platform update
- Problematic Hardware/cluster sizing and/or scaling issues
- Defunct operational practices
The Solr Audit Offering
The KMW Solr Audit is a deep dive into an existing Solr platform by Search experts. A team of KMW consultants will review Solr configurations, schemas, query logs, plugins, cluster sizing, web application features and full application architecture. Customer SME’s will be interviewed to identify and prioritize pain points and areas for improvement. The KMW Solr Audit is tailored to each customer’s specific needs to ensure maximum value for the engagement.
Areas of Focus
Architecture
- Solr Configuration
- Schema Configuration
- Custom plugin review
- Indexing and data transformations
- Content enrichment and entity extraction
- Query syntax review
- Scaling and data volume review
- DevOps
- Disaster recovery planning
- Fault Tolerance / High Availability
- Security (SSL / Authentication / Authorization)
User Experience
- Search UI review
- Query parameter reviews
- Spell Checking and Autocomplete
- Faceting and Analytics
- Teasers (static and dynamic)
- User behavior tracking
- Relevancy tuning
- User/customer specific synonym dictionaries and management
- Multi-language search and localization
Infrastructure & Ops
- Query volume and sizing
- Update/Commit volume and sizing
- Monitoring
- Query log analytics
- Index snapshot/backup
- CI/CD/DevOps
- Cluster Sizing and Scaling
Product / IT Roadmap Review
- Review of roadmap features / goals
- Map existing Solr features to roadmap
- Recommendations / implementation strategies
- Sizing of features – Levels of Effort
- Assistance with planning and prioritization
The key deliverable from the KMW Solr Audit is a consulting report which details all the recommendations, why they are good for the organization and any associated config samples, links or commentary. The recommendations are also scored for complexity of implementation and impact to the business to help with prioritization and planning.
Solr Audits have lead to impactful findings and recommendations for our customers. Actual KMW customer results have included:
- Large reduction in production hardware due to memory and configuration tuning
- Significant decrease in the amount of content stored within a PROD search index resulting in less disk space needed
- Decrease in average query latency due to enhanced use of autowarming and filter other caches
- Increased stability of PROD Solr cluster due to implementing a unified commit strategy
- Major improvements to relevancy and precision by replacing wildcards and fuzzy search operators with ngram filters
- Identification of most engaged user segments and geo-location from query logs
- Resolution of top 10 queries that previously return zero search results
If you think a Solr Audit would be a good fit for your organization contact us to learn more.