What to do about a .watches dangling index

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

In the process of doing a rolling restart of my cluster, I am now seeing a dangling index error on one of my nodes.

[2017-10-06T16:23:00,190][WARN ][o.e.g.DanglingIndicesState] [ES149] [[.watches/i1GOvi3HRuiKaP3v6-D7OQ]] can not be imported as a dangling index, as index with same name already exists in cluster metadata
[2017-10-06T16:23:00,306][WARN ][o.e.g.DanglingIndicesState] [ES149] [[.watches/i1GOvi3HRuiKaP3v6-D7OQ]] can not be imported as a dangling index, as index with same name already exists in cluster metadata

I cannot just delete the index, as it is protected. I am not seeing this error on any other node.

What should I do in this situation?

2

Hey,

this error means, that there is one node, which has an old watches index lying around, that it tries to get back into the cluster. You can physically delete the directory on that node with the ID mentioned in the log message and then the watches index is tried to be loaded.

When a node joins the cluster, any shards/indices stored in its local data/ directory which do not already exist in the cluster will be imported into the cluster by default. This functionality is intended as a best effort to help users who lost all master nodes. If a new master node is started which is unaware of the other indices in the cluster, adding the old nodes will cause the old indices to be imported, instead of being deleted.

hope this helps

--Alex

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