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Even when you continuously monitor your Elasticsearch cluster through a tool like Datadog, you may want to quickly ascertain what's happening right now to answer questions like:
To answer questions like these, it's safe to assume that you'd be already inside of the (linux) terminal, performing commands like [du](<https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/du.1.html>)
, [ps](<https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/ps.1.html>)
, etc. If you look closely, all these commands respond in a table-like format. But remember that Elasticsearch is a JSON-in, JSON-out interface.
Now, JSON is greatβ¦ for computers. Even if itβs pretty-printed, trying to find relationships in the data is tedious. Human eyes, especially when looking at a terminal, need compact and aligned text. The compact and aligned text (CAT) APIs aim to meet this need.
Running GET _cat
lists all the available commands:
=^.^=
/_cat/allocation
/_cat/shards
/_cat/shards/{index}
/_cat/master
...
Appending ?help
to a particular command works similarly to the man
command on linux:
GET _cat/allocation?help
shards | s | number of shards on node
disk.indices | di,diskIndices | disk used by ES indices
disk.used | du,diskUsed | disk used (total, not just ES)
disk.avail | da,diskAvail | disk available
disk.total | dt,diskTotal | total capacity of all volumes
disk.percent | dp,diskPercent | percent disk used
host | h | host of node
ip | | ip of node
node | n | name of node
Here are some of the commands I run on a regular basis to get a glimpse of what's going on.
GET _cat/health?v&h=timestamp,cluster,status
timestamp cluster status
15:13:15 elasticsearch yellow