GET _nodes/stats in 7.13 includes large amount of potentially unwanted "clients" information by default

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Having just upgraded our Elastic Cloud cluster from 7.12.1 to 7.13.0 we've found that GET _nodes/stats now includes a fairly large chunk of data about "clients" which wasn't present before. This could be useful, but I'm not sure if it needs to be included by default? It's pretty hefty!

I believe the related issue from the release notes is Show Connected Clients API · Issue #61609 · elastic/elasticsearch · GitHub.

For us, this broke our integration with the justwatch/elasticsearch-exporter (which we use to make ElasticSearch stats Prometheus scrapable). :sob:

I can see that this can be disabled via the http.client_stats.enabled cluster setting, but wonder if the default ought to be false, rather than true?

2

Further to this, using the http.client_stats.enabled does remove the heavy response :tada:, but it doesn't fix my parsing problem because the http part of the response still includes an empty array "clients":[ ]. :sob:

3

I think you'll need to take this up with the folks responsible for the parsing code you're using. Adding fields to a response isn't considered a breaking change, we expect clients to ignore fields they don't recognise.

4

Thanks David. That’s a totally fair design assumption.

Sadly the exporter we’re using seems to have fallen out of regular maintenance some time ago, so I guess it was inevitable something like this would arise eventually. Will investigate what can be done though.