Public Elastic demos such as Elastiflix and the OpenTelemetry demo are excellent for generating multi-service telemetry. They are not, by themselves, a Business Critical Service operating model. This article maps what those demos show, which Content Share packs to import next, and how to inject the join keys that survive async boundaries.
What the demos are good for
What you get: realistic services, traces, metrics, and a storyline you can click through. What you still need: a BCS name, capability labels, session/content/message bridges, a multi-layer scoreboard, and a drill-down path into network and Kubernetes evidence when the failure is not “one slow span.”
Why Content Share packs still matter
Demos prove Elastic can observe an application graph. Production BCS questions ask whether the service the business sells is healthy across UX, edge, origin, network, and platform—often without one shared trace.id. The packs on Elastic Content Share are the glue: conventions, queries, dashboards, synthetics, and SLOs you can adapt after the demo cluster is up.
Who should read this
- Engineers evaluating Elastic Observability with a public demo first
- Platform/SRE teams turning a workshop demo into an internal BCS template
- Anyone who finished Elastiflix/OTel demo and asked “what do we import into our shared content library next?”
When to use a demo vs when to skip straight to packs
Use a demo when you need live traces and a shared sandbox narrative. Skip to packs when you already have telemetry and need correlation keys, BCS scoreboard, async ES|QL, RUM journey conventions, or layer hubs (network/K8s).
How the layers map
| Demo signal | BCS layer | Content Share next step |
|---|---|---|
| Frontend / user clicks | Experience | RUM journey pack, synthetics templates |
| Service traces / dependencies | Origin (hop-local) | Tracing investigation pack |
| Often missing: CDN/edge | Edge | Add CDN logs later; use session/content joins from correlation keys |
| Cluster under the demo | Platform | Kubernetes Observability hub |
| Rarely first-class in app demos | Network | Network Observability hub when path is the lesson |
Which packs to import (ordered)
- Correlation keys (BCS) — Why: agree labels before dashboards diverge.
- BCS health dashboard — Why: composite scoreboard + demo events pattern.
- Async ES|QL bridges — Why: session/content/message joins when traces stop at a hop.
- RUM journey pack — Why: real-user funnel conventions for the experience layer.
- Tracing investigation pack — Why: runbook from red origin capability to dependency/span.
- Synthetics + journey SLOs — Why: proactive checks and budgets beside the demo’s happy path.
How to inject sample join keys in a demo
If the demo lacks BCS labels, add minimal attributes on frontend and services:
labels.critical_service— e.g.demo_streamingordemo_checkoutlabels.bcs_capability— discover/play or browse/checkoutlabels.session_id— stable per browser sessionlabels.content_idorlabels.order_id— stable entity across async workers
Prefer copying IDs across queue producers/consumers as labels.correlation_id rather than inventing a fake global trace.id across systems that cannot propagate it.
Where the official sources live
Do not vendor entire demo apps into WordPress uploads. Run them from upstream, then import Content Share packs into your Elastic/Kibana.
Original source
Read more in the original content
Start with Elastic’s public observability examples, then return here for the BCS composition path.
Related downloads
Global IT Health — Native Findings for Elastic Observability
Turn existing ECS and OpenTelemetry data into prioritized operational findings. This zero-effort package discovers services, evaluates bootstrap SLOs, learns ML baselines, detects changes and log patterns, triggers alerts, and produces an evidence-grounded AI briefing in one Global IT Health dashboard.
Observed Assets Inventory Dashboard for Elastic
See every host, service, and pod your cluster has actually observed from ECS or OpenTelemetry — identity, signal coverage, and health on each asset, not event counts. Import the Lens ES|QL dashboards and they light up on logs-*, metrics-*, and traces-* with no extra mapping.
Distributed Tracing Investigation Pack for Elastic APM
Hop-local APM/OTel investigation runbook and ES|QL: dependency errors, slow spans, and entity-scoped traces after a BCS scoreboard marks origin red.
RUM User Journey and Conversion Pack for Elastic
Real-user journey funnel, Core Web Vitals, and session-aware RUM conventions for Business Critical Services—built to stitch with CDN and origin via session IDs.
Network Engineering Topology for Kibana
Import a clickable Kibana topology dashboard with Vega zone and adjacency views, plus an Agent Builder readiness agent that checks whether discovered devices have enough evidence for reliable map placement.
Business Critical Service Health Dashboard for Elastic
Multi-layer BCS scoreboard (TV streaming example): experience, CDN, origin, network, platform—with demo events joined by session and content IDs.
What to do next
- Run or open the upstream demo you prefer (Elastiflix or OTel demo).
- Apply correlation keys and regenerate a short burst of labeled traffic.
- Import the BCS dashboard and one ES|QL bridge; prove a session/content join.
- Follow the End-to-End Observability step-by-step path for synthetics, SLOs, and layer hubs.