Challenge concepts

[pmbrull]

Hello and thank you for your time,

I was wondering if there was something similar to the Metric Keys info. for challenge options to further understand how the workload is actually treated by the DB.

https://esrally.readthedocs.io/en/stable/metrics.html#metric-keys

Thank you,
Pere

[danielmitterdorfer]

Hi,

challenges are basically just a label for a specific workload, e.g. in our standard Rally tracks we have challenges like "append-no-conflicts-index-only" which are basically bulk-indexing benchmarks. What tasks are run is specified by the challenge's schedule property. Actually, in newer versions of Rally, challenges are also an optional concept. So if your Rally track consists of only one challenge, you might as well just specify the schedule property and forget about challenges alltogether (see the example track in our tutorial).

In the metrics store, the challenge is just yet another property of the metrics document which you can use to filter documents.

Daniel

[pmbrull]

Hi Daniel,

First of all, thank you for your fast response. However, maybe I did no fully explain myself. What I was looking for was information about this piece of code:
{
"operation": ,
"clients": 1,
"warmup-iterations": 1000,
"iterations": 1000,
"target-throughput": 100
},

To know if there where more options and also get a brief explanation of them to know, for example, why one should use warmup-iterations.

Thanks again,
Pere

[danielmitterdorfer]

Hi Pere,

I see. This concept is called a "task" in Rally and the task's properties are described in the track reference docs.

For a more thorough explanation why you need a warmup phase in a benchmark, I recommend you read my blog article Seven Tips for Better Elasticsearch Benchmarks or if you'd rather watch a video you can also watch my corresponding talk from Elastic{ON} 2018 (free to watch but requires prior registration).

Daniel