Output configuration question

Hi everyone,

I am curious about the code described here :

output {
  elasticsearch {
    hosts => ["http://localhost:9200"]
    index => "%{[@metadata][beat]}-%{+YYYY.MM.dd}" 
    document_type => "%{[@metadata][type]}" 
  }
}

I've run this config for a year now and this is creating a lot of indexes (one or more per day).
Is this supposed to be a code example to illustrate the possibilities offered in output, or the best way to organize the data ?
Should I have simply created a single index like this ?

index => "%{[@metadata][beat]}"

Thanks for your help!

How large are your daily indicies? This will be the determining factor. I would not remove the date element completely as eventually the indicies will become too large, and deleting data to make space will be a more complex process. However, you may be able to move from daily to monthly indicies if your current daily indicies are really small (e.g. < 1GB).

This is a good question, I think they may be <100mb / day.
Is there quick way to get this info (like average size) ?

You can access data about the indicies by querying the REST API. In Kibana go to Dev Tools -> Console and execute the query:

GET _cat/indices?v

It seems I was wrong about the size. My indices are between 200mb and 500mb / day

EDIT: I did a quick average on a year on my two outputs.
The first one is approx sending 20mb/day, but the second one is around 350mb/day.

I think i'll follow your input and change how the first is configured to something like

"%{[@metadata][beat]}-%{+YYYY.MM}"

That is pretty small. I if changed to monthly indices, by changing this...

index => "%{[@metadata][beat]}-%{+YYYY.MM.dd}"

to this...

index => "%{[@metadata][beat]}-%{+YYYY.MM}"

You will reduce the number of indices significantly. The only downside is that if you want to drop old data by simply deleting old indices, you would have to drop a full month at a time, but this is likely not an issue in your case.

Thanks for your help, i'll think about it.

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.