# Forced Awareness Setting

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/forced-awareness-setting/264060>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [February 11, 2021, 10:27pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/forced-awareness-setting/264060 "2021-02-11T22:27:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![abdulazizali77](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/abdulazizali77/32/83806_2.png) [@abdulazizali77](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/abdulazizali77)\
**Post date:** [February 11, 2021, 10:27pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/forced-awareness-setting/264060/1 "2021-02-11T22:27:35Z")

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Hi  
Currently im testing 7.2 from a zip file in a development environment on Windows 10.

I apologize if this has been thoroughly explained elsewhere but Ive looked at a few of the old forced awareness topics here and i think i severely still dont understand how it works or is supposed to work. I understand how allocation awareness works with attributes, and filtering with includes, excludes but just not the `force.*.values`.  
Ive looked at `AwarenessAllocationDecider`, `FilterAllocationDecider` and `AllocationDecider` and i do believe my prior assumption to how Forced awareness should work is incorrect, im hoping someone can clarify my misunderstanding.

My initial tests and assumptions are such  
a) I have 7 nodes within cluster1 with `node.attr.zone` respectively a,b,c,d,e,f,g for node-1 to node-7.  
b) I have an index `newindex` with 1 + 1 replica  
c) I set `"transient":{ "cluster.routing.allocation.awareness.attributes": "zone"}`  
d) I set `"transient": {"cluster.routing.allocation.awareness.force.zone.values": "a,b"}`. My assumption is that the failover shards will be recreated on nodes with zone values of a or b (respectively node-1 and node-2).

e) I check which nodes the p and r shards are assigned to, and then hopefully its not node-1 nor node-2 and i shut down the `newindex` replica node.  
f) I expect that the `newindex` replica shard will be recreated in either node-1 or node-2 corresponding to `zone=a,b`. However it doesnt seem to be the case, it just recreates the replica on any available node with the zone attribute.  
g) Looking at `AwarenessAllocationDecider` it only actually checks for available number of nodes, i havent looked at the routing code yet, but i guess im expecting that somewhere its actually checking for the value of the attribute within the nodes (in this case there are only two nodes available instead of seven) for the decider to actually make that call. But specifically in `AwarenessAllocationDecider` i dont see that. Which makes me realize either i have a fundamental misunderstanding of how 'forced awareness' is supposed to work or there is a bug.

Hence questions:  
i) Why are the `force.*.values` required if the values arent used? It seems just providing the `awareness.attributes` would be sufficient  
ii) Is it supposed to account for primaries or replicas or all shards?  
iii) How is it modified by other settings? eg allow\_rebalance etc  
iv) How is it supposed to be used with allocation filtering, include/exclude/require? It seems to be that just assigning include seems to be sufficient to recreate an a failed shard

Any hints will be very valuable, thank you  
Aziz

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [March 11, 2021, 10:28pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/forced-awareness-setting/264060/2 "2021-03-11T22:28:32Z")

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