Deleting Old Monitoring Indices

[crickes (Steve Crickett)]

With reference to the following post:

Delete Monitoring's old indices

Hi, Is there any smart way to delete old indices of Monitoring(Marvel)? Simply delete indices, using elasticsearch-curator or any other way? thanks

I've noticed today that my monitoring cluster (single node) isn't deleting any old indices. I haven't changed any of the default settings ad I now find myself with indices going back several months, and a very full disk. I need to delete them and get the automatic deletion working.

So what can prevent the automatic deletion mechanism from working? Is there anywhere I can check to see why they haven't been deleting automatically after 7 days? Does the cluster health have to be green for example? I only have a single node for the monitoring cluster and as I haven't tampered with the monitoring templates, it still tries to create replica shards and leave them unallocated. Is this why the indices aren't being cleared out after 7 days perhaps?

[tanguy]

Hi crickes,

The automatic deletion of old monitoring indices is available only for exporters of type local and the retention duration can be configured using the setting xpack.monitoring.history.duration if you have a non-basic license (see https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/x-pack/current/monitoring-settings.html#monitoring-collection-settings).

This feature is not available when using http exporters, in this case you can use Curator.

[crickes (Steve Crickett)]

@tanguy Thanks for the clarification.