1. From Azure Search to
SearchStax
Portland SUG #10
August 2021

2. Making the case:
Azure Search vs Solr
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3. Hosting options
Azure hosted and self managed
Azure hosted and partner managed
Azure hosted and Sitecore managed (partner managed)
Deployment models
PaaS
AKS
Azure Search vs Solr
Solr blows away Azure’s limits
Solr has better performance – > it’s 4x faster when indexing
Solr is available in more regions than Azure
Solr is significantly less expensive for larger deployments
As of Sitecore XP 10.0.0, Azure Search is deprecated and will be completely removed in the next release (v 10.1)
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4. What is SearchStax
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5. Managed Solr
Fully Managed Search Service
• Search infrastructure automation
• Alerts and monitoring
• Backups and Disaster Recovery solutions
• Public and private cloud environments on
AWS, Azure and Google
SearchStax’s Managed Solr & Site Search
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Site Search
Relevant & Personalized Search
• Gain search insights & analytics
• Marketing managed search with advanced
search capabilities & personalization
• Search experience management
• Search results optimization (A/B Tests)

6. SearchStax for Sitecore
• High availability - Multi-node clusters with fault tolerance architecture. Cross-region backup and disaster
recovery options for mission-critical apps.
• Global clusters - Support for 60+ regions across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform
• Uptime and support SLA for mission-critical applications - Uptime and response time SLA guarantees 24x7
coverage; less than 30 minutes response time
• Multi-cloud - Run your search infrastructure on any cloud--ours or yours--including AWS, Azure and Google
• Designed for developer productivity - Build applications faster without losing control using automation,
APIs, and Webhooks
• Secure - Built-in security controls, features, and processes to meet compliance standards, including SOC 2
Type II certification
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7. Why SearchStax?
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8. Problems with a DIY Solr implementation and maintenance
Solr is not a core
expertise
There is no doubt that your
developers have the skills to deploy,
manage and scale Solr — but is that
the best use of their valuable time?
Focus your team on value-added
tasks that improve the customer
experience.
High availability Solr is
complicated
Setting up and managing high
availability Solr is time consuming and
has many moving parts. Your team not
only needs to ramp up on Solr, Java
and Zookeeper — but also do it in a
high availability fashion.
Solr operations are a
distraction
Free your team from incident
management, planned and
unplanned maintenances, post-
mortem, security updates, patches
and continuous infrastructure
improvements.
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9. Features of SearchStax for Sitecore
• Checks the connectivity between Sitecore and Solr running on SearchStax
• Uploads config files to the Solr deployment
• Determines if the Solr is running on a single non-production node, or if it’s a multi-node production-grade
high-availability cluster.
• Creates appropriate collections in Solr
• Configures collections for redundancy and high-availability if it detects Solr is running as a cluster
• Creates aliases for XDB collections
• Updates the config files in Sitecore to make sure it is able to communicate with the Solr
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10. Sitecore Managed Cloud architecture
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11. Compliance
✓ SOC2 Type II Certified
✓ Privacy Shield Framework
✓ GDPR Compliance
✓ Data Sovereignty
✓ CSA CAIQ
✓ PCI DSS
Security
✓ Encryption in Transit
✓ Encryption at Rest
✓ Basic Authentication
✓ IP Filtering
✓ SearchStax User Roles
✓ Audit Logs
✓ Zookeeper Security
✓ SearchStax Dashboard Security
Built in compliance

12. How it works
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13. 14

14. 15

15. Activating SearchStax
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16. 17

17. 18

18. 19

19. Managed Solr
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20. SearchStax Managed Solr features
Multi-cloud Scalability Private environments
Flexible
architectures
Disaster recovery
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Webhooks
Integrations
Management APIs

21. Multi-regional cloud options for Managed Solr
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22. MULTI-REGION CLUSTER
Production Deployment
High Availabilityand Performance
with cross-regionredundancy
DEVELOPMENTNODE
PRODUCTION CLUSTER
Solr Architectures for any scale from Development to Production

23. Auto-ScaleTriggerMechanism
TRIGGER RESULTS
Scheduled Action
Scheduled Action helps define
rules to perform scaling actions
at certain times in future
ChangeCapacity+2 nodesat 3:00pm PST
on December21, 2020
ChangeCapacity-1nodeat 3:00pm PST
on December30, 2020
Scaling Rules
Scaling Rules help define rules to
performscaling actions
depending upon alerts trigged via
Managed Solr
ChangeCapacity +1 node if
Alert(CPU_Utilization > 65% and < 75%,
5mins) UpperBound: 10
ChangeCapacity +3 nodes if
Alert(CPU_Utilization > 85%,
5mins) UpperBound: 10
ChangeCapacity -1node if
Alert(CPU_Utilization < 30%,
5mins) LowerBound: 2
ChangeCapacity +2 node if
Alert(RequestsPerSecond> 100,
5mins) UpperBound: 10
Scaling Service Request
Service Requests allow
customers to submit ad-hoc
scaling requests (unplanned or
not well defined)
ChangeCapacity +1
node
Save Infrastructure Costs — Pay for what youneed
Scaling automation options to help deal with traffic changes
Copyrights © SearchStax® Inc. 2014-2020.AllRights
Reserved.

24. Copyrights © SearchStax® Inc. 2014-2020.AllRights
Reserved.
SearchStaxsupports Managed Solr deploymentsin Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) on AWS or Google Cloudand on Virtual Private Networks (VNet)on the MicrosoftAzureCloud
Private environments for security and performance

25. Disaster recovery options
Hot
• A standby system that replicates
your production or active
environment.
• An interruption in service at the
primary site triggers a rapid
switch to the standby site.
• The standby system runs in a
different cloud-provider region.
Warm
• A single-node version of a “hot”
system
• Limited throughput and
redundancy
• Lower-cost option relative to Hot
Cold
• Uses Cross-Region Replication to
write your backup file to a remote
region
• There is no standby deployment
and no expense for maintaining
one
• If the primary system fails,
SearchStax engineers spin up a
new deployment in the remote
region and restore a pre-
positioned backup.
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26. Management APIs for managing Solr deployments remotely
• Authentication
• Users
• Basic Auth
• IP filtering
• Deployment
• DNS Alias
• Backup/Restore
• Tags
• Alerts
• Webhooks
• Zookeeper
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27. Integrations for additional monitoring and alerting
• New Relic monitoring
• New Relic APM – application analytics
• New Relic Servers – server metrics
• Pager Duty alerts
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28. Alerts & webhooks for advanced customizations
Alerts – create alerts based on a selection of metrics Webhooks – add custom functionality based on alerts
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29. Site Search
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30. Reliable & trusted implementation partner
Search configuration
Search analytics
Search UX
accelerator
SXA Toolbox support
Sitecore
personalization and
testing support
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31. With SearchStax UX Accelerators deliver site search best practices on your site in less than 60 minutes.
✓Search feedback
✓Prominent search bar
✓Auto-suggestions
✓Facets
✓Color coded
categories
✓Promotions
✓Spellcheck
✓Alternative result views
✓Sorting
✓Pagination
Get up and running quickly

32. Use a dashboard interface to configure search features with facets, synonyms, stopwords, spell checking, auto-suggest and related
searches.
✓Results and Display
✓Hit Highlighting
✓Faceting
✓Stopwords
✓Synonyms
✓Spell Check
✓Auto-Suggest
Manage search without coding

33. Create or edit differentmodels to quicklytest and compare competing search experiences.Give specific fields the boost they need to rank
higher in results.Use Rules to improve the search experience.Promote content to the top of the results page to create customized experiences.
✓Multiple Relevance Models
✓Search Fields
✓Ranking
✓Rules
✓Promotions
Improve search ranking & relevance with Relevance Models

34. Relevance models are also used in Sitecore personalization
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Models allow customizing search fields, search ranking, search rules, and custom promote search results in a given order for a particular
query.

35. SXA Toolbox support for the search page rendering
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36. ✓Dashboard
✓Most Popular Searches
✓No Result Searches
✓Searches With No Clicks
✓Most Clicked Content
✓Least Clicked Content
✓Power Search (search
query reporting)
May 30, 2021 — June 30 2021
1.4k 185
TOTAL SEARCHES TOTAL CLICKS CLICK-THROUGHRATE
12.8%
CONVERSIONSFROMSEARCH
AVERAGECLICKPOSITION
5
4
3
AVERAGE
CLICK
POSITION
2
1
CLICK-THROUGHRATE
50
40
30
CLICK-THROUGH
RATE
%
20
10
NORESULTSSEARCHES
10
NO
RESULTS
SEARCHES
%
5
06-05 06-12 06-19 06-26 07-03 06-05 06-12 06-19 06-26 07-03 06-05 06-12 06-19 06-26 07-03
TIME TIME TIME
AVERAGESEARCHLATENCY
5.8MS
▼37.9%
SiteSearch
Straight-forward search analytics

37. Let’s create
remarkable search
experiences!