# Indices: Better to have 1 for each month or 1 for each day?

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/indices-better-to-have-1-for-each-month-or-1-for-each-day/190084
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [July 11, 2019, 5:39pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/indices-better-to-have-1-for-each-month-or-1-for-each-day/190084 "2019-07-11T17:39:30Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![aviationfan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c37758/32.png) [@aviationfan](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/aviationfan)
#### Post date: [July 11, 2019, 5:39pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/indices-better-to-have-1-for-each-month-or-1-for-each-day/190084/1 "2019-07-11T17:39:31Z")

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I am curious about the tradeoffs of the setup I currently have. My indices are setup as 1 for each month of the year instead of 1 per day. The number of events per day are 100K to 200K depending on user traffic. Just looking for advice on whether it would be better to have daily indices vs monthly.

 ![Stack_Monitoring_-elasticsearch_jjwelch-Elasticsearch-_Indices](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/8/b/8bed74ccce086ae71ab376e77177da110ef4c0c3.png)

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### Author: ![DavidTurner](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/davidturner/32/22453_2.png) [@DavidTurner](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/DavidTurner)
#### Post date: [July 11, 2019, 6:14pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/indices-better-to-have-1-for-each-month-or-1-for-each-day/190084/2 "2019-07-11T18:14:57Z")

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Here's an article about shard sizing:

> **[How many shards should I have in my Elasticsearch cluster?](https://www.elastic.co/blog/how-many-shards-should-i-have-in-my-elasticsearch-cluster)**
>
> If you are looking for practical guidelines around how many indices and shards to have in your cluster, this blog post will help you avoid common pitfalls.

TLDR fewer larger shards are better (up to a point of course, but that point is a long way off in your case). Here you could reasonably go for _yearly_ indices. Daily ones would definitely be far too small.

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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: [August 8, 2019, 6:14pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/indices-better-to-have-1-for-each-month-or-1-for-each-day/190084/3 "2019-08-08T18:14:58Z")

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