Hello from the Elastic DevRel team! In this newsletter, we cover the first Elastic Jina models, complimentary on-demand trainings, the latest blogs and videos, and upcoming events.

Version 9.2 of Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack bring:

• Elastic Agent Builder, a new LLM-powered framework to help developers build custom AI agents that provide the right context from Elasticsearch via conversational interfaces. This simplifies workflows around relevance and agentic automation.

• Streams (AI-driven log summarization), automatically parse, compress, and extract insights from unstructured logs, helping SREs accelerate investigations and reduce operational overhead.

• ES|QL enhancements, with smart lookup joins (enrichment across multiple fields including comparisons like <, >, !=) and remote clusters) and native time series analysis in Discover — functions such as RATE, TBUCKET, and *_OVER_TIME directly in the UI/queries.

• Vectors excluded from _source by default for newly created indices — reduces storage overhead and often improves indexing performance.

• Improved vector search efficiency with DiskBBQ — a novel approach to vector index storage and retrieval that reads compact clusters directly from disk, removing the need to load complete indexes into memory and significantly reducing memory usage. Performance benchmarks indicate sub-20 ms latency even with tight memory constraints.

ELSER and Jina models for sparse and dense embeddings via Elastic Inference Service (EIS) are now available. These models are accessible directly in Elastic Cloud Serverless as .elser-2-elastic and .jina-embeddings-v3 inference endpoints. EIS generates embeddings and performs vector search in a predictable, pay-as-you-go plan (per millions of tokens), without setting up ML nodes. 

With the Jina model available through EIS and using semantic_text, multi-lingual semantic search got easier and more predictable cost-wise.

It’s straightforward to create an index which will be used in semantic search scenarios backed up by dense vectors (no model setup needed):

Adding data doesn’t require any extra network roundtrips; everything is handled by Elasticsearch and EIS under the hood:

Then performing multilingual semantic search:

Returning the results as cherries, naranjas, bananas, framboises, apple, der Apfel, and tomato:

Elastic Agent Builder: Jonathan Simon outlines how to build an AI agent and connect it with the A2A protocol orchestrated with the Strands Agents SDK in Getting started with Elastic Agent Builder and Strands Agents SDK.

ES|QL: Learn about the latest enhancements to ES|QL in 9.2: Smart Lookup Joins and time-series support by Tyler Perkins, Kostas Krikellas and Julian Kiryakov.

Context engineering: Explore The impact of relevance in context engineering for AI agents with Joseph McElroy.

Search relevance: Alexander Marquardt explains How to improve e-commerce search relevance with personalized cohort-aware ranking.

Streams: Discover the advantages of parsing logs in streams in Streams Processing: Stop Fighting with Grok. Parse Your Logs in Streams by Luca Wintergerst.

Observability: Dive into the latest Observability trends for 2026: Maturity, cost control, and driving business value with the Elastic Observability Team.

Security: Daniel Stepanic analyzes the shared characteristics between NANOREMOTE, cousin of FINALDRAFT and malware described in REF7707. 

Security enablement: Automating detection tuning requests with Kibana cases covered by Aron Jewitt.

Security malware: Elastic’s 100% protection in 2025 AV-Comparatives Tests by Roxana Gheorghe.

Jina: Try out the latest Jina tutorials for 

• Jina embeddings v3

• Jina Reranker v3

• Jina Reader

Check out these videos:

• Evaluating AI agents on Elastic Agent Builder by Abhi Anand.

• How I used Elastic Agent Builder to create an AI baby sleep consultant by Olivia Petrie.

• Embracing failure and chaos to improve system reliability and SRE team performance by Alex Hidalgo.

Featured blogs from the community:

• Unifying Intelligence — How Elasticsearch Simplified the Agentic Stack using Agent Builder! by Someshwaran M.

• The Day Our Own Queries DoS’ed Us: Inside Zalando Search by Maryna Kryvko and Ivan Potapov.

• A Fluent PHP Elasticsearch Query Builder by Paul Redmond.

• Production-Ready .NET API Logging: Serilog, Elasticsearch & OpenTelemetry by Gerry Bellows.

Join our first Elastic Agent Builder Livestream — January 22nd, 2026

ElasticOn Tour, the one-day Elastic conference series around the world, is back. Register and join us in:

Paris — January 27, 2026

London — February 26, 2026

São Paulo — March 5, 2026

Sydney — March 5, 2026

Tokyo — March 10, 2026

Singapore — March 17, 2026

Washington, D.C. — March 19, 2026

And we’d like to have a good representation of the Elastic Community on stage. Submit your ideas, even if still a bit raw — we're happy to iterate on them with you.

Join your local Elastic User Group chapter for the latest news on upcoming events! You can also find us on Meetup.com.

If you’re interested in presenting at a meetup, send an email to meetups@elastic.co