Where to install?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hey folks,

Unless I have missed it, the docs do not seem very clear with regards to how to install watcher on a cluster.

If watcher is installed upon multiple nodes in the cluster, does it generate multiple alerts / actions or is this co-ordinated somehow?

I am a little unsure on whether I need to install the plugin on all of my nodes, or set up a specific (non-master, non-data) watcher node to do the watching (SPOF of course).

Actually, my temptation is to set it up on our (3) master nodes and giving the master nodes the job of monitoring the cluster, which seems broadly appropriate.

Any advice on how to structure this?

Thanks

2

Watcher will only run once on the elected master node, but by installing it on all nodes you're able to send watcher api request to any nodes and ES will be able to redirect the request to the elected master node. Otherwise other nodes will not recognize any watcher request and reject it. Also the license plugin the watcher plugin relies on needs to be installed on all nodes. So in general to keep things simple, we just recommend to install Watcher on all nodes in your cluster.

3

Thanks Martijn. Looks like I have a rolling restart of the cluster on my todo list :wink:

4

Just wanted to remind here that this is a Beta1 release of Watcher, so please avoid installing it on your production cluster. If you do want to evaluate Watcher on your production cluster, I'd set up a separate cluster dedicated for watcher and use the http input to monitor the production cluster.