# Bulk Read-only indexes on Upgrade Assistant from 8.19 to 9.1

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/bulk-read-only-indexes-on-upgrade-assistant-from-8-19-to-9-1/384490>\
**Category:** Kibana\
**Created:** [January 12, 2026, 9:30pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/bulk-read-only-indexes-on-upgrade-assistant-from-8-19-to-9-1/384490 "2026-01-12T21:30:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![agustin](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/agustin/32/146645_2.png) [@agustin](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/agustin)\
**Post date:** [January 12, 2026, 9:30pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/bulk-read-only-indexes-on-upgrade-assistant-from-8-19-to-9-1/384490/1 "2026-01-12T21:30:33Z")

</div>

I am upgrading an 8.19 cluster to 9.1 using the Upgrade Assistant after spinning it up from our current 7.17 snapshot. I unfortunately have over 2k indices that require action, most of them deprecated but in the process of moving their docs out of Elastic and into a long-term storage managed internally. I would like to avoid deletion at this point in time.

Is there a way of bulk updating the indices to read-only, or am I doomed to click on every single one of them? Solutions in this forum have not worked so far, such as setting “index.block.write“ or “index.read\_only“ to true, to have the Upgrade Assistant validate the indices.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![agustin](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/agustin/32/146645_2.png) [@agustin](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/agustin)\
**Post date:** [January 12, 2026, 9:44pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/bulk-read-only-indexes-on-upgrade-assistant-from-8-19-to-9-1/384490/2 "2026-01-12T21:44:48Z")

</div>

I did manage to find a solution through dev tools: the Kibana endpoint does take CSV index names. This worked for me:

```auto
POST kbn:api/upgrade_assistant/update_index/index_1,index_2,index_3...

{"operations":["blockWrite","unfreeze"]}

```