I have a Elasticsearch cluster running on AWS Elasticsearch instance. It is up running for a few months. I'd like to know the most used query requests over the last few months. Does Elasticsearch save all queries somewhere I can search? Or do I have to programmatically save the requests for analysis?
As far as I'm aware, Elasticsearch doesn't by default save a record or frequency histogram of all queries. However, there's a way you could have it log all queries, and then ship the logs somewhere to be aggregated/searched for the top results (incidentally this is something you could use Elasticsearch for :D). Sadly, you'll only be able to track queries after you configure this, I doubt that you'll be able to find any record of your historical queries the last few months.
To do this, you'd take advantage of Elasticsearch's slow query log. The default thresholds are designed to only log slow queries, but if you set those defaults to 0s then Elasticsearch would log any query as a slow query, giving you a record of all queries. See that link above for detailed instructions how, you could set this for a whole cluster in your yaml configuration file like
index.search.slowlog.threshold.fetch.debug: 0s
or set it dynamically per-index with
PUT /<my-index-name>/_settings
{
"index.search.slowlog.threshold.query.debug": "0s"
}
To be clear the log level you choose doesn't strictly matter, but utilizing debug for this would allow you to keep logging actually slow queries at the more dangerous levels like info and warn, which you might find useful.
I'm not familiar with how to configure an AWS elasticsearch cluster, but as the above are core Elasticsearch settings in all the versions I'm aware of there should be a way to do it.
Happy searching!
Is it possible to see which are the most popular searched phrases/words within a particular index in elasticsearch.
Can this be set up in kibana at all.
You can do that by using Search Slow log - https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index-modules-slowlog.html
You can set the slow log setting dynamically too. Once this is set you should see the logs in index_search_slowlog.log. Ingest these logs back to elasticsearch and visualize in kibana. You can create the dashboard from this data.
We use these slow logs to monitor slow queries, popular queries etc.
How do Elasticsearch and Solr compare in respect to the following:
Indexing logs.
Indexing events.
Indexing PDF documents.
Ease of creating and distributing visualizations. Kibana vs Banana.
Support and documentation for developers.
Any help is appreciated.
EDIT
More specifically, i am trying to figure out how exactly a PDF document or an event can be indexed at all. I have worked a little bit on Elasticsearch and since i am a fan of JSON, i found it quite useful when i tried to index structured data.
For example logs are mostly structured and thus i guess easier to index and search. Now what if i want to index the whole log file itself?
Follow up
Is Kibana the only visualization tool available for Elasticsearch?
Is Banana the only visualization tool available for Solr?
Here is an answer to try to address just the Elasticsearch aspect of the post.
Take a look at https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-mapper-attachments for handling PDFs
For events/logs, you would need to transform those into structured data to index in Elasticsearch. You can have a field in there for the source (the log file the data came from and other information like that) - you will have all the data in the whole log file indexed in that fashion. You can take advantage of ES aggregations to group results based on log file, calculate statistics, etc.
The ELK stack is definitely worth a look.
I don't know if Kibana is the only visualization tool but it is probably the most popular and likely to offer more than something else.
I am new to elasticsearch and want to index my website logs which are stored on HDFS for fast querying.
I have a well structured pipeline which runs a script every 20 minutes to ingest the data into HDFS.
I want to integrate elasticsearch with it, so that it also indexes these logs based on particular field(s) and thereby giving faster query results using spark SQL.
So, my question is, can I index my data based on particular field(s) only?
Also, my logs are saved in avro file format. Does es provides a way to directly index avro serialized data or do I need to convert it into some other format?
Thank you in advance.
I would suggest you to look at Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana stack that should be good enough to full fill your requirement. Putting it on HDFS and then using ES would be additional overhead.
Instead, you can use Logstash to pump data into ES, index on whatever fields you wish to query and build easy dashboards in less than 10 minutes of exercise. Take a look at this tutorial for better step-by-step guide.
http://hadooptutorials.co.in/tutorials/elasticsearch/log-analytics-using-elasticsearch-logstash-kibana.html
I am learning NoSQL and looking at different options for one of my client's requirements. I have gone through various resources before putting up this question (a person with little knowledge in NoSQL)
I need to store data at faster rate and read data.
Fully fail-safe and easily scalable.
Able to search through data for Analytics.
I ended up with a short list of: Cassandra and Elasticsearch
What I do understand is Cassandra is a perfect NoSQL storage solution for me, as I can write data and read data using indexes. Where it fails or it could fail is on Analytics. In the future, if I want to get data from from_date to to_date, or more ways to get data for analytics, if I don't design the Data model properly or keeping long term sight, which might be quite hard in ever changing world.
While Elastic Search is best at indexing (backed by Lucene), and can search the data randomly by throwing some random text. But does it work the same for even if I want to retrieve data from_date to to_date (I expect it might be). But the real question is, is it a Search Engine, or perfect NoSQL data storage like Cassandra? If yes, why do we still need Cassandra?
If both of these are in different world, please explain that! How do we combine them to get a more effective solution?
One of our applications uses data that is stored into both Cassandra and ElasticSearch. We use Cassandra to access those records whenever we can, and have data duplicated into query tables designed to adhere to specific application-side requests. For a more liberal search than our query tables can allow, ElasticSearch performs that functionality nicely.
We have asked that same question (of ourselves)..."Why don't we just get everything from ElastsicSearch?"
The answer is that ElasticSearch was designed to be a search engine, and not a persistent data store. Sometimes ElasticSearch loses writes. Schema changes are difficult to do in ElasticSearch without blowing everything away and reloading. For that purpose, I have written jobs that are designed to keep ElasticSearch in-sync with our Cassandra cluster. There was also a fairly recent discussion on Quora about this topic, that yielded similar points.
That being said, ElasticSearch works great as a search engine. And Cassandra works great as a scalable, high-performance datastore. But querying data is different from searching for data. There are times that we need one or the other, and a combination of the two works well for our application. It may (or it may not) work well for yours.
As for analytics, I have had some success in using the Cassandra Spark connector, to serve more complex OLAP queries.
Edit 20200421
I've written a newer answer to a similar question:
ElasticSearch vs. ElasticSearch+Cassandra
Cassandra + Lucene is a great option. There are different initiatives for this issue, for example:
Stratio’s Cassandra Lucene Index - Derived from Stratio Cassandra, is a plugin for Apache Cassandra that extends its index functionality. (https://github.com/Stratio/cassandra-lucene-index)
Stratio Cassandra, it's a native integration with Apache Lucene, it is very interesting. (https://github.com/Stratio/stratio-cassandra) - THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED IN FAVOUR OF Stratio’s Cassandra Lucene Index
Tuplejump Calliope, it's like Stratio Cassandra, but it's less active. (https://github.com/tuplejump/stargate-core)
DSE Search by Datastax. It allows using Cassandra with Apache Solr, but it's a proprietary option.(http://www.datastax.com/what-we-offer/products-services/datastax-enterprise)
After working on this problem myself I have realized that NoSQL databases like casandra are good when you want to make sure you are preserving your data schema with reliable writing operation, and don't want to take advantage of indexing operations that elasticsearch offers. In case you want to preserve some indexes data then elasticsearch is good in case you are trusting your scheme and only going to do far more reads than writes.
My case was data analytics. So I preserved a lot of my Latices in elastic search since later I wanted to traverse through the data a lot to see what should be my next step. I would have used casandra if I wanted to have a lot of changes in the schema of the data in my analytic pilelines.
Also there are many nice representing tools like kibana that you can use to present your data with some good graphics. Maybe I am lazy but they are very good looking and they helped me.
Storing data in a combination of Cassandra and ElasticSearch gives you most functionality. It allows you to lookup key-value tables, and also allows you to search data in indexes.
The combination gives you a lot of flexibility, ideal for your application.
Elassandra is the combined solution of Cassandra + Elastic search , It uses Elastic search to index the data and Cassandra as the data store , i'm not sure about the performance but as per this article , its performance is good.
If your application needs search feature then , Elassandra is the best open source option. DSE search is available but its expensive.
We had developed an application where we used Elasticsearch and Cassandra.
Similar data was stored into Cassandra and indexed into Elasticsearch.
Our application's UI was having features like searches, aggregations, data export, etc.
The back-end microservices were continuously getting huge data (on Kafka topics) and storing it into Cassandra. Once the data is stored into Cassandra, the services would make sure the data is indexed into Elasticsearch.
Cassandra was acting as "Source of truth" for Elasticsearch. In the cases, where reindexing of the ES index was required, we queried Cassandra and reindexed the data into ES.
This solution helped us, as this was very easy to scale and the searches and aggregations were much faster.
Cassandra is great at retrieving data by ID. I don't know much about secondary index performance, but I doubt it's as fast as Elasticsearch. Certainly Elasticsearch wins when it comes to full text search functionality (text analysis, relevancy scoring, etc).
Cassandra wins on update performance, too. Elasticsearch supports updates, but an update is really a reindex + soft delete in an atomic operation.
Cassandra has a very nice replication model (if you need to be extra-fail-safe). Elasticsearch is OK, too, I'm not in the camp that says ES is particularly unreliable (it has issues sometimes, like all software).
Elasticsearch also has aggregations for real-time analytics. And because searches are so fast, analytics on a subset of data will be fast, too.
If your requirements are satisfied well enough by one of them (like here it seems like ES would work well), I would just use one. If you have requirements from both worlds, then you can either:
use one of them and work around the downsides. For example, you may be able to handle many updates with Elasticsearch, but with more shards and more hardware
use both and make sure they're in sync
As elasticsearch is built on Lucene index and if you want to store indexing in elasticsearch it performs best comparing to indexing in Cassandra itself for retrieving the data.
If your requirements are not related to real-time retrieval then you can use elasticsearch as NoSQL database also, there are thoughts that ElasticSearch loses writes & Schema changes are difficult, but if your volume of data is not too big. You can easily achive elasticsearch as a search engine with best indexing along with elasticsearch as aNoSQL database. There are several way that you can prevent it. I have worked on the schema changes in elasticsearch, if your data structure is consistent then it will create any issues.
Being a supporter of ElasticSearch or SOlr. I have worked on both the search engines and i experienced that both the search engines can be used fluently if you configure them correctly.
Only cons that i can think of it, if you are targetting real time result and can't comprosie milliseconds delay in your response. Then its better to take help of other NoSQL databases like cassandra or couchbase.
Cassandra with solr, work better than Cassandra with elasticSearch.