When the scripts that generate the data for letsencrypt.org/stats broke yet again, we decided to retire it rather than repair it. Let’s Encrypt issues six to ten million certificates each day, producing a large volume of logs that keeps growing. It became increasingly time-consuming and difficult to answer questions about our own issuance like “how many certificates use the ‘shortlived’ profile.” Using raw logs, this requires finding, parsing and extracting relevant portions of loglines. Querying the database behind our issuance API is not a practical option, as it’s built for transactions rather than analysis. We’d also used a log search SaaS product, but our bills were growing much faster than we’d like, and while it was fine for searching, it wasn’t able to do the analytic workloads we needed. We knew we could dream bigger and better.