Group/count/average consecutive buckets

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Suppose I have a date/time field for each document. Now suppose that I group my documents into hourly buckets using a date_histogram aggregation. Now suppose that there are some hours with no documents. So the document count for a 12 hour period might look like this:

Hour 1: 12
2: 10
3: 0
4: 5
5: 90
6: 11
7: 0
8: 0
9: 56
10: 88
11: 33
12: 111

What I want to do is find the average number of consecutive buckets with non-zero counts. So here, we have the first cluster of 2 consecutive hours with non-zero counts, followed by hour 3 with 0 count, then 3 consecutive buckets of non-zero, followed by two buckets with 0, and finally 4 consecutive buckets of non-zero.

So in this example, what I want is the avg(2, 3, 4) = 3. Is there a clever way to do this in ES using some combination of aggregations?

2

Not that I know of. But doing this on client-side looks easy? For the record, doing it on the Elasticsearch side wouldn't be more efficient.

3

Would it not be more efficient from a data transfer over the network perspective if I were only retrieving an average value as opposed to all the bucket counts? Especially if I were doing this over many queries?

4

If your client application and the Elasticsearch cluster are on the same local network, this wouldn't be an issue. Even on a remote network I don't think this would be an issue unless the date histogram would loooots of buckets.