# How to rebuild .watches

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-rebuild-watches/66762
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Tags:** elastic-stack-alerting
**Created:** [November 21, 2016, 6:22pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-rebuild-watches/66762 "2016-11-21T18:22:18Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![piyush](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecb155/32.png) [@piyush](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/piyush)
#### Post date: [November 21, 2016, 6:22pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-rebuild-watches/66762/1 "2016-11-21T18:22:18Z")

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Hi Team,  
we had couple of ES nodes failure last week and after that we rebuild most of the indexes. i closed .watches index that time because shards were missing. Now ES is up and running but watcher is not.

I tried to open .watches index but it says shards are missing (UNASSIGNED) and cluster becomes red. I tried to delete the .watches index but got below error:

{  
"error": "This endpoint is not supported for DELETE on .watches index.",  
"status": 400  
}

How can i rebuild .watches index now? In a post i read to restart watcher, how to to that?

Thanks & Regards,

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### Author: ![piyush](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecb155/32.png) [@piyush](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/piyush)
#### Post date: [November 22, 2016, 7:28pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-rebuild-watches/66762/2 "2016-11-22T19:28:32Z")

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Please respond, it's important. All alerts are blocked for now.

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### Author: ![spinscale](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/spinscale/32/25011_2.png) [@spinscale](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/spinscale)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2016, 3:26pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-rebuild-watches/66762/3 "2016-11-23T15:26:27Z")

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Hey,

the [troubleshooting section](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/watcher/2.4/troubleshooting.html#_dynamic_mapping_error_when_trying_to_add_a_watch) has some information how to delete the watches index if necessary. Be sure you have set `watcher.index.rest.direct_access: true` in your `elasticsearch.yml` file

--Alex

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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: [December 21, 2016, 3:26pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-rebuild-watches/66762/4 "2016-12-21T15:26:30Z")

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