Is it possible to determine if an index was created automatically?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi everyone,

there are thousands of indices in our ES cluaster. Some of them were created automatically and some were explicitly created with a PUT request.

I need to get the list of indices that were auto created which I suspect don't have correct settings and mappings, is there a way to achieve that?

I love the /_cat/indices api but I don't find a parameter to return only the auto created ones.

Any input is appreciated. Thanks.

2

As far as I know that information is not available.

1 Like
3

To the best of my knowledge, the only way to know whether an index was auto-created is by looking at the elasticsearch logs.

It does not appear that we track that in the index settings/metadata.

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4

IMHO, since es server knows if an index exists and creates it if not, it definitely is able to record such a flag in the index metadata with a tiny code change. I’m curious why this was not done. It’s helpful to users diagnosing prod issues.