Community Meetup @ Infrabel

Join our next meetup on June 25th! We will have 3 talks and will share some food and drinks while networking

Location: Infrabel, Rue des Deux Gares 82, 1070 Anderlecht, Belgium

Agenda:
17:45 : Doors open
18:00 - 18:40 : Drinks and pizza
18:40 - 18:45 : Welcome
18:45 - 19:10 : Elastic @ Infrabel
19:10 - 19:50 : From unknown and raw to real value
19:50 - 20.15 : What’s new in Elastic v9
20:15 : Wrap up

Talks:
Elastic @ Infrabel
In this presentation, we will explain how Infrabel uses Elastic today and how it supports our current needs.
We will briefly outline some future optimizations and the integration of OpenTelemetry to further strengthen and extend our Elastic platform.
To showcase how we use Elastic for addressing real business use case, we will demo a never-seen-before application build in collaboration with Elastic Belgium.

Safia Souabi – Big Data Engineer at Infrabel
Olivier-Désiré Muhimpundu – Big Data Engineer at Infrabel

From unknown and raw to real value
In this talk, Chris shares how he transformed a legacy log ingestion pipeline into a structured, scalable, and insight-ready ELK-based system. Starting from loosely indexed XML/SOAP logs with minimal configuration, the project required rebuilding the data model to handle multiple message types, complex nested structures, and inconsistent field representations.

Without the luxury of a full upfront redesign, Chris adopted an iterative, data-driven approach: combining exploratory analysis with dynamic mapping strategies to progressively shape the data into a usable format. He will discuss how this led to the design of flexible ingestion pipelines, including XML parsing, normalization, and generic handling of heterogeneous payloads.

The talk also covers practical techniques for managing sensitive data, reducing storage overhead, and improving query performance—such as selective data retention, hashing and fingerprinting strategies, and the use of data streams. Finally, Chris will