Was the watch-history index series moved between v2 and v5

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi,

I'm migrating two of our ElasticCloud clusters from ElasticSearch v2.* to v5. I've worked through most of the breaking-changes, but I'm a little confused by apparent changes to the indices watcher creates.

On older versions of ElasticSearch / Watcher the watch-history indices were of the form .watch_history-yyyy.mm.dd, but under x-pack 5.1.2 they seem to have been moved to .watcher-history-2-yyyy.mm.dd based on GET _cat/indices.

Are there any release notes documenting the changes to the watcher history indices? Were there any other major changes to these indices between versions?

As a bonus question, what exactly is the .triggered-watches index for? I've never seen it populated with any data, so I assume it's used as a temporary data index for use by Watcher internally.

Thanks for any information you can offer,
Ryan

2

Hey,

we renamed the watch history and created a revision number for the index template (in this case 2, so we can gradually change the schema without breaking BWC compatibility (so the issue what happened to your with an outdated watch history template will not happen in 5.x). The rest of the renaming was just to be consistent across the stack.

The triggered watches index only exists to store current executions. The main reason is to make sure, that in case of a master node switch the new master node knows which watches had been executed by the old one (but not finished) and triggers them again. After a watch has run successfully the entry is deleted, thus this index is mostly empty.

--Alex

3

Thanks Alex, that makes things a lot clearer,

Ryan