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Index management in Kibanaedit

Kibana’s Index Management features are an easy, convenient way to manage your cluster’s indices, data streams, and index templates. Practicing good index management ensures your data is stored correctly and in the most cost-effective way possible.

What you’ll learnedit

You’ll learn how to:

  • View and edit index settings.
  • View mappings and statistics for an index.
  • Perform index-level operations, such as refreshes.
  • View and manage data streams.
  • Create index templates to automatically configure new data streams and indices.

Required permissionsedit

If you use Elasticsearch security features, the following security privileges are required:

  • The monitor cluster privilege to access Kibana’s Index Management features.
  • The view_index_metadata and manage index privileges to view a data stream or index’s data.
  • The manage_index_templates cluster privilege to manage index templates.

To add these privileges in Kibana, go to Stack Management > Security > Roles.

View and edit indicesedit

Open Kibana’s main menu and click Stack Management > Index Management.

Index Management UI

The Index Management page contains an overview of your indices. Badges indicate if an index is a follower index, a rollup index, or frozen.

Clicking a badge narrows the list to only indices of that type. You can also filter indices using the search bar.

You can drill down into each index to investigate the index settings, mapping, and statistics. From this view, you can also edit the index settings.

To view and explore the documents within an index, click the compass icon compassicon next to the index name to open Discover.

Index Management UI

Perform index-level operationsedit

Use the Manage menu to perform index-level operations. This menu is available in the index details view, or when you select the checkbox of one or more indices on the overview page. The menu includes the following actions:

Manage data streamsedit

The Data Streams view lists your data streams and lets you examine or delete them.

To view more information about a data stream, such as its generation or its current index lifecycle policy, click the stream’s name.

To view and explore the data within a data stream, click the compass icon compassicon next to the data stream name to open Discover.

Data stream details

To view information about the stream’s backing indices, click the number in the Indices column.

Backing index

Manage index templatesedit

The Index Templates view lists your templates and lets you examine, edit, clone, and delete them. Changes made to an index template do not affect existing indices.

Index templates

If you don’t have any templates, you can create one using the Create template wizard.

Try it: Create an index templateedit

In this tutorial, you’ll create an index template and use it to configure two new indices.

Step 1. Add a name and index pattern

  1. In the Index Templates view, open the Create template wizard.

    Create wizard
  2. In the Name field, enter my-index-template.
  3. Set Index pattern to my-index-* so the template matches any index with that index pattern.
  4. Leave Data Stream, Priority, Version, and _meta field blank or as-is.

Step 2. Add settings, mappings, and aliases

  1. Add component templates to your index template.

    Component templates are pre-configured sets of mappings, index settings, and aliases you can reuse across multiple index templates. Badges indicate whether a component template contains mappings (M), index settings (S), aliases (A), or a combination of the three.

    Component templates are optional. For this tutorial, do not add any component templates.

    Component templates page
  2. Define index settings. These are optional. For this tutorial, leave this section blank.

  3. Define a mapping that contains an object field named geo with a child geo_point field named coordinates:

    Mapped fields page

    Alternatively, you can click the Load JSON link and define the mapping as JSON:

    {
  "properties": {
    "geo": {
      "properties": {
        "coordinates": {
          "type": "geo_point"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

    You can create additional mapping configurations in the Dynamic templates and Advanced options tabs. For this tutorial, do not create any additional mappings.

  4. Define an alias named my-index:

    {
  "my-index": {}
}
  5. On the review page, check the summary. If everything looks right, click Create template.

Step 3. Create new indices

You’re now ready to create new indices using your index template.

  1. Index the following documents to create two indices: my-index-000001 and my-index-000002.

    POST /my-index-000001/_doc
{
  "@timestamp": "2019-05-18T15:57:27.541Z",
  "ip": "225.44.217.191",
  "extension": "jpg",
  "response": "200",
  "geo": {
    "coordinates": {
      "lat": 38.53146222,
      "lon": -121.7864906
    }
  },
  "url": "https://media-for-the-masses.theacademyofperformingartsandscience.org/uploads/charles-fullerton.jpg"
}

POST /my-index-000002/_doc
{
  "@timestamp": "2019-05-20T03:44:20.844Z",
  "ip": "198.247.165.49",
  "extension": "php",
  "response": "200",
  "geo": {
    "coordinates": {
      "lat": 37.13189556,
      "lon": -76.4929875
    }
  },
  "memory": 241720,
  "url": "https://theacademyofperformingartsandscience.org/people/type:astronauts/name:laurel-b-clark/profile"
}

  2. Use the get index API to view the configurations for the new indices. The indices were configured using the index template you created earlier.

    GET /my-index-000001,my-index-000002
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