Is data stream backing indices are explicitly created or auto created?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi everyone,

For example, elastic-cloud-logs-8 is a data stream and its underlying indices are like this .ds-elastic-cloud-logs-8-2025.01.22-016804.

So question is: is data stream backing indices are explicitly created or auto created?

to be specific, if I set auto_create_index to false in cluster settings, will the backing indices be created successfully?

Note: I have tried for this specific case in the example, it still get created successfully. So the question is for all data stream generally, is there a config for explicit creation or auto-creation?

2

anyone could help on this? Thanks.

3

Data streams use rollover so indices are explicitly created behind the scenes by Elasticsearch when a rollover happens. auto_create_index determines whether a new index is automatically created if you index a new document into an index that does not already exist.

4

Thank you. That is so helpful.