# Managed index templates, composition, and ECS

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/managed-index-templates-composition-and-ecs/266734>\
**Category:** Logstash\
**Tags:** ecs-elastic-common-schema\
**Created:** [March 9, 2021, 6:10pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/managed-index-templates-composition-and-ecs/266734 "2021-03-09T18:10:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4

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**Author:** ![Supermathie](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/supermathie/32/44936_2.png) [@Supermathie](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Supermathie)\
**Post date:** [March 19, 2021, 8:04pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/managed-index-templates-composition-and-ecs/266734/4 "2021-03-19T20:04:40Z")

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Where I am today:

I discovered that Elastic provides [tooling](https://github.com/elastic/ecs/) to do EXACTLY what I want:

- specify our own custom fields in a meaningful way
- integrate the ECS definitions
- create the templates in a format that logstash can apply to elasticsearch

It took roughly a day to get tooled up and get something production-ready using the ECS tooling in that repository. I'd strongly suggest looking at that; you can specify your new fields (and aliases for backwards compatibility!) in YAML files and then generate your index templates from that.

So now we'll be doing _nothing_ alluded to in the original post 😆. But I do like this new method better.

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_[View the full topic](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/managed-index-templates-composition-and-ecs/266734)._