# Index Lifecycle Management "does not point to index" error

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-lifecycle-management-does-not-point-to-index-error/211513>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Tags:** ilm-index-lifecycle-management\
**Created:** [December 11, 2019, 7:01pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-lifecycle-management-does-not-point-to-index-error/211513 "2019-12-11T19:01:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jerrac](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/jerrac/32/52980_2.png) [@jerrac](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/jerrac)\
**Post date:** [December 18, 2019, 11:01pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-lifecycle-management-does-not-point-to-index-error/211513/7 "2019-12-18T23:01:33Z")

</div>

There are no more pending tasks, but I still have that life cycle error on 540 indices.

When viewing the filebeat-7.4.2-2019.11.27 index in Kibana, the ILM section looks like this:

```auto
Index lifecycle management
Index lifecycle error
illegal_argument_exception: index.lifecycle.rollover_alias [filebeat] does not point to index [filebeat-7.4.2-2019.11.27]

Lifecycle policy
    filebeat-lane-custom-existing
Current action
    rollover
Failed step
    check-rollover-ready

Current phase
    hot
Current action time
    2019-11-27 14:44:15

```

That specific index has this in its settings:

```auto
"index.lifecycle.name": "filebeat-lane-custom-existing",

```

It doesn't have any rollover\_alias or other alias.

The only aliases that exist:

```auto
.kibana .kibana_3 - - - -
.kibana_task_manager .kibana_task_manager_2 - - - -
metricbeat metricbeat-000001 - - - true
heartbeat heartbeat-000001 - - - true
filebeat filebeat-000001 - - - true
journalbeat journalbeat-000001 - - - true
logstash logstash-000001 - - - true

```

This is the filebeat-lane-custom-existing policy:

```auto
PUT _ilm/policy/filebeat-lane-custom-existing
{
  "policy": {
    "phases": {
      "hot": {
        "min_age": "0ms",
        "actions": {
          "set_priority": {
            "priority": 100
          }
        }
      },
      "warm": {
        "actions": {
          "allocate": {
            "number_of_replicas": 1,
            "include": {},
            "exclude": {}
          },
          "forcemerge": {
            "max_num_segments": 1
          },
          "set_priority": {
            "priority": 50
          },
          "shrink": {
            "number_of_shards": 1
          }
        }
      },
      "cold": {
        "min_age": "90d",
        "actions": {
          "allocate": {
            "number_of_replicas": 0,
            "include": {},
            "exclude": {}
          },
          "freeze": {},
          "set_priority": {
            "priority": 0
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

```

Um, on the specific index I listed above, I see this under the error message: `Current action time 2019-11-27 14:44:15`

Is that saying that the index hasn't tried to apply a ILM policy since 11/27?

There is one other lingering issue that I don't think is actually related to the life cycle error message, but I figured I'd better mention it. Just in case.

When viewing my policy in Kibana, I see this message:

```auto
No node attributes configured in elasticsearch.yml
You can't control shard allocation without node attributes.

```

I'm not sure what to do about that message since I'm running a test cluster on a single desktop via Docker Compose. My nodes look something like the following in my docker-compose.yml file.

```auto
  esnode3:
    container_name: esnode3
    image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.5.0
    environment:
      - cluster.name=reagan3-cluster
      - node.name=esnode3
      - node.master=true
      - discovery.seed_hosts=esnode1
      - cluster.initial_master_nodes=esnode1,esnode2,esnode3
      - bootstrap.memory_lock=true
      - "ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms6000m -Xmx6000m"
      - http.cors.enabled=true
      - http.cors.allow-origin="*"
    ulimits:
      memlock:
        soft: -1
        hard: -1
    volumes:
      - r3_cluster_esdata3:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data
      - r3_cluster_snapshots:/opt/elasticsearch/snapshots
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl","-s" ,"-f", "http://localhost:9200/_cat/health"]
    ports:
      - 127.0.0.1:9203:9200
    networks:
      - elknet
    restart: always

```

As you can see, I'm only using environment variables to configure ES. If I recall correctly, when I first saw that message, I thought it had something to do with not configuring `node.master`, but as you can see, adding `node.master` to the environment section didn't help...

Anyway, I think I'm stumped on this for the day. So I'll end here.

---

_[View the full topic](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-lifecycle-management-does-not-point-to-index-error/211513)._