# Removing data from Elasticsearch **URL:** \ **Category:** Elasticsearch\ **Created:** [August 3, 2017, 11:01pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/removing-data-from-elasticsearch/95784 "2017-08-03T23:01:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Puk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ea5d25/32.png) [@Puk](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Puk)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2017, 11:01pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/removing-data-from-elasticsearch/95784/1 "2017-08-03T23:01:00Z")
Newbie to ELK Stack here and have just deployed it to my environment after testing it out in a lab for a few weeks. Its going great and I have all my servers reporting in after pushing filebeat with Ansible, but I'm finding some logs with lots of data I don't want in ELK. I'm filtering this out after the fact in the filebeat.yml files, but I want to get rid of the data from Elasticsearch, as for example I found some of my hosts with over 1GB of /var/log/messages per day which I don't want. So far all I've found is **curl '[http://10.10.10.1:9200/\_cat/indices?v](http://10.10.10.1:9200/_cat/indices?v)'** to search for the indexes and then **curl -XDELETE '[http://10.10.10.1:9200/filebeat-2017.08.03](http://10.10.10.1:9200/filebeat-2017.08.03)'** to remove them. THis works fine as the data at this moment isn't important so I can just flush on mass, but my questions are:-1: 1. Does this flush everything, or is there other stuff I need to clear out? I have a feeling I'm just removing the index and not raw data? 2. Is there a way to do this but just target one specific beats.hostname? ---
**Author:** ![jasontedor](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/jasontedor/32/66992_2.png) [@jasontedor](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/jasontedor)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2017, 11:46pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/removing-data-from-elasticsearch/95784/2 "2017-08-03T23:46:05Z")
Deleting an index leads to the underlying data being deleted. For your second question, you can use delete-by-query. ---
**Author:** ![Puk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ea5d25/32.png) [@Puk](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Puk)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2017, 2:27am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/removing-data-from-elasticsearch/95784/3 "2017-08-04T02:27:50Z")
Thanks, thats good to know it deletes the data too. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2017, 2:27am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/removing-data-from-elasticsearch/95784/4 "2017-09-01T02:27:56Z")
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