Can I get messages from the Kibana visualization? - elasticsearch

Wondering if there is a way to get list of the messages related to a Kibana visualization. I understand if I apply the same filter on the "Discover", which is on "Visualization", I can filter the related messages. But I want to have more direct user experience like an user clicks on a region of a graph and can get the related messages which formed that region. Is there any way to do it?

This helped me:
https://discuss.elastic.co/t/can-i-get-the-related-messages-from-a-kibana-visualization/101692/2
It says:
Not directly, unfortunately. You can click on the visualization to create a filter, and you can pin that filter and take it to discover, which will do what you're asking, but isn't very obvious.
The reason is that visualizations are built using aggregate data, so they don't know what the underlying documents are, they only know the aggregate representation of the information. For example, if you have a bunch of traffic data, and you are looking at bytes over time, the records get bucketed by time and the aggregate of the bytes in that bucket are shown (average, sum, etc.).
In contrast, Discover only works with the raw documents, showing you exactly what you have stored in Elasticsearch. Both documents and aggregations can use filters and queries, which is why you can create a filter in one and use it in the other, but the underlying data is not the same.

Related

Filter result in memory to search in elasticsearch from multiple indexes

I have 2 indexes and they both have one common field (basically relationship).
Now as elastic search is not giving filters from multiple indexes, should we store them in memory in variable and filter them in node.js (which basically means that my application itself is working as a database server now).
We previously were using MongoDB which is also a NoSQL DB but we were able to manage it through aggregate queries but seems the elastic search is not providing that.
So even if we use both databases combined, we have to store results of them somewhere to further filter data from them as we are giving users advanced search functionality where they are able to filter data from multiple collections.
So should we store results in memory to filter data further? We are currently giving advanced search in 100 million records to customers but that was not having the advanced text search that elastic search provides, now we are planning to provide elastic search text search to customers.
What do you suggest should we use the approach here to make MongoDB and elastic search together? We are using node.js to serve data.
Or which option to choose from
Denormalizing: Flatten your data
Application-side joins: Run multiple queries on normalized data
Nested objects: Store arrays of objects
Parent-child relationships: Store multiple documents through joins
https://blog.mimacom.com/parent-child-elasticsearch/
https://spoon-elastic.com/all-elastic-search-post/simple-elastic-usage/denormalize-index-elasticsearch/
Storing things client side in memory is not the solution.
First of all the simplest way to solve this problem is to simply make one combined index. Its very trivial to do this. Just insert all the documents from index 2 into index 1. Prefix all fields coming from index-2 by some prefix like "idx2". That way you won't overwrite any similar fields. You can use an ingestion pipeline to do this, or just do it client side. You only will ever do this once.
After that you can perform aggregations on the single index, since you have all the data in one-index.
If you are using somehting other than ES as your primary data-store you need to reconfigure the indexing operation to redirect everything that was earlier going into index-2 to go into index-1 as well(with the prefixed terms).
100 million records is trivial for something like ELasticsearch. Doing anykind of "joins" client side is NOT RECOMMENDED, as this will obviate the entire value of using ES.
If you need any further help on executing this, feel free to contact me. I have 11 years exp in ES. And I have seen people struggle with "joins" for 99% of the time. :)
The first thing to do when coming from MySQL/PostGres or even Mongodb is to restructure the indices to suit the needs of data-querying. Never try to work with multiple indices, ES is not built for that.
HTH.

How does ElasticSearch handle an index with 230m entries?

I was looking through elasticsearch and was noticing that you can create an index and bulk add items. I currently have a series of flat files with 220 million entries. I am working on Logstash to parse and add them to ElasticSearch, but I feel that it existing under 1 index would be rough to query. The row data is nothing more than 1-3 properties at most.
How does Elasticsearch function in this case? In order to effectively query this index, do you just add additional instances to the cluster and they will work together to crunch the set?
I have been walking through the documentation, and it is explaining what to do, but not necessarily all the time explaining why it does what it does.
In order to effectively query this index, do you just add additional instances to the cluster and they will work together to crunch the set?
That is exactly what you need to do. Typically it's an iterative process:
start by putting a subset of the data in. You can also put in all the data, if time and cost permit.
put some search load on it that is as close as possible to production conditions, e.g. by turning on whatever search integration you're planning to use. If you're planning to only issue queries manually, now's the time to try them and gauge their speed and the relevance of the results.
see if the queries are particularly slow and if their results are relevant enough. You change the index mappings or queries you're using to achieve faster results, and indeed add more nodes to your cluster.
Since you mention Logstash, there are a few things that may help further:
check out Filebeat for indexing the data on an ongoing basis. You may not need to do the work of reading the files and bulk indexing yourself.
if it's log or log-like data and you're mostly interested in more recent results, it could be a lot faster to split up the data by date & time (e.g. index-2019-08-11, index-2019-08-12, index-2019-08-13). See the Index Lifecycle Management feature for automating this.
try using the Keyword field type where appropriate in your mappings. It stops analysis on the field, preventing you from doing full-text searches inside the field and only allowing exact string matches. Useful for fields like a "tags" field or a "status" field with something like ["draft", "review", "published"] values.
Good luck!

Data model for fields that change frequently in ElasticSearch

What is the best way to deal with fields that change frequently inside a document for ElasticSearch? Per their docs about partial updates...
Internally, however, the update API simply manages the same retrieve-change-reindex process that we have already described.
In particular, what should be done when the indexing of the document will likely be expensive given the number of indexed field and the size of some of the text fields that have to be analyzed?
As a concrete example, use SO's view and vote counts on questions and answers. It would seem expensive to reindex the text body just to update those values.
Maybe you shouldn't update so frequently. Perhaps things like vote/views should only be periodically updated in ES, while more critical fields like answers/questions be pushed immediately. Consider what's most important and see if you can get away with some level of staleness.
ElasticSearch is great for text search, but I would not consider ES to support SO in its entirety (or similar applications). It could be a useful tool for searching for answers/questions on SO, or for internal applications (like log/event analysis). But perhaps the actual serving of data could be better done with a different solution? Maybe it should be powered by Cassandra instead for the bulk of the work? You get the idea...
If you want to use ES as a solution to your needs, and you MUST update frequently, you could definitely consider the parent/child model mentioned already. of course, that method will require more memory/disk space, and it will take up more cpu/time when you query for totals. An alternative would be to have the parent store searchable fields, and let the child hold the metadata (where the child's fields are not analyzed). this will allow you to make frequent updates without having to undergo an expensive re-index, since there is nothing to index.
You could also consider what I mentioned above and see if you can get away with some staleness. This can be done in many ways too. You can throttle your requests by type of change, or change the refresh/flush interval, or consider de-duping updates if you are sending updates in bulk. These too have their shortcomings...
I think best way to handle the change is to split the document (you can use Parent child relationship, or just have parent id), and make document as small as possible (moving changeable part to new types) .
This can be a way to accomplish your requirement say SO,
You can use multiple types for this, consider This post (Views and Vote count).
Create a type for post, view and vote.
For a post , index a document to post type (index post id, title description tag), and for every view of that post you can index a document to view type (with id of post), and if voted you can index vote with (no of votes , id of post and other info you need [like positive or negative flag] ) to vote type.
So, to get views for post, use filter of post id, and get document counts in views type
To get no of votes, use stat aggregation for no of votes , or terms aggregation followed by stat aggregation for getting positive and negative votes.
This is way I think is best, and there can be other opinion too.
Thanks
What I do is that I use a database like mongo or mysql for storing properties that get updated frequently and use elastic search to store documents for text searching.
Example: I want to keep data about a book and its contents and I also want to keep the total number of views, updating and reindexing the document each time a user views it is a total overkill.

Does Elasticsearch stream results?

Does Elasticsearch stream the query results as they are "calculated" or does it calculate everything and then return the final response back to the client?
By default elasticsearch will only return a limited set of results for a query. (i.e. searching for * will only return the default count set regardless of the number of matches).
Generally to implement "streaming" , you make an initial search to get total count of matching documents and then ask for documents in ranges ( i.e. first 10, next 10, etc.. )
See
http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-request-from-size.html
for how to request the number of documents returned.
Have you tried scroll query?
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-request-scroll.html much easier to deal with than pagination.
Scrolling is not intended for real time user requests, but rather for processing large amounts of data, e.g. in order to reindex the contents of one index into a new index with a different configuration.
Answer to the question in the comments:
So question would this be the right way to export large results for a
"report" type system? I'm not talking about frond end? I'm talking
about a back end application that will execute a custom query and
build a file with 300000 + result
I'm sure there might be a valid reasons for doing this, but to me it sounds like you're using a hammer to drive screws. Much of the point of using elasticsearch is to use it's aggregations features to do more of the computing in the data store.
Aggregations Documentation
If you really need the raw data of 300000 records, then thats what you need. However, if it's a report, that implies you're doing some manipulation of the data into metrics. Much of the point of ES is that it allows you to build "custom reports" on the fly. I suspect it will be much faster to put as much logic as you can into the query, rather simply manipulating the raw data.
Without knowing more about the requirements, I can't come up with any better answer than that.
No, Elastic so far does not support this. The Elastic API uses a traditional request/response model. The query results are paginated, buffered on the server-side, and sent back to the client. A truly read of the response body in a streaming fashion does not seem to be in the Elastic roadmap.
With that said, for big result sets the scroll API has been deprecated and was never intended for real-time user queries. At the moment the best option is the search_after that could be seen as a cursor in traditional RDBMS.

Need clarification about usage of mahout with hadoop

I currently have an implementation of a recommender in mahout using the in memory recommendation apis. However, I would like to move to a distributed solution using hadoop in order to calculate offline recommendations. This is my first time using hadoop and I'm looking for clarification on a few concepts and api usages.
Currently, my understanding of hadoop is minimal and I think that the correct approach is the following:
use something like apache drill in order to populate the hdfs with the user and item data.
using the recommendation job in mahout train on the data from the hdfs.
transform the resultant data in the hdfs to index shards to be used by solr
use solr to provide the recommendations to the userbase
However, I am looking for clarifications on a couple aspects of this design:
How would I utilize a rescorer in the manner that it is used in the in memory live recommendations?
What is the best manner in which to invoke the recommendations job?
I have other questions besides these two but the answers to these would be a huge help.
You may be talking about the Mahout + Hadoop + Solr recommender. This method handles rescoring in a couple different ways.
The basic recommender can be put together in two ways:
After getting data into into HDFS in the form of (user id, item id, preference weight) run the ItemSimilarityJob on the data (use LLR similarity, which is usaully best). It will create what is called an indicator matrix. This will be an item id by item id sparse matrix of values indicating the similarity magnitude between any two items. You must then convert this into values that Solr can index. That means translating the internal Mahout integer IDs into some unique string representation, which is probably what they were at the very beginning. This will look like (item123,item223 item643 item293 item445...) as a CSV. so two Solr fields, the first is an item id, the second is a list of similar items. All ids must be text tokens. Then the query for recommendations is a Solr query made up of item ids that a particular user has shown a preference for. So query = "item223 item344 item445...". Make the query against the filed that olds the indicator matrix values. You will get back an ordered list of item IDs
A much easier way that may work for you is to use a tool in the /examples folder of Mahout 1.0-SNAPSHOT or here: https://github.com/pferrel/solr-recommender. It takes in raw log files with unique strings for user and item ids. it does all the work on Hadoop to output CSVs that can be indexed by Solr directly or loaded into a DB as described above.
The way I did the demo site (https://guide.finderbots.com) is to use my Solr web app integration, putting the indicator matrix into a DB attaching the similar item list to my collection of items. So item123 got item223 item643 item293 item445... in its indicator field. After you index the collection the query is then = "item223 item344 item445..." -- the user's prefered items.
Here are three ways to do rescoring:
Mix in metadata with the query. So you could do query = "item223 item344 item445..." against the indicator field AND "SciFi" against the "genre" field. This gives you blended collaborative filtering and metadata in your query and as you can imagine, the recs are based on the user's prefs but skewed towards "SciFi". There are lots of other interesting things you can do once you get item+indicators+metadata into an index.
Filter recs by metadata. You can get recs not skewed but filtered, if you want. Using the Solr query = "item223 item344 item445..." against the indicator field AND "SciFi" as a filter against the "genre" field. In this case you get nothing but "SciFi" where #1 you would get mostly "SciFi"
Get your ordered list of recs back and rescore them in any way you'd like based on other things you know about the user, context, or items. Often these can be encoded into a Solr query and done with one query but reordering and filtering can be done after the recs are returned too. You would have to write that code, it is not built in.
The fun thing is you can mix filters, metadata fields, and user preferences with what Solr calls "boost" values to get all sorts of rescoring. Solr can even use location to query, skew, or filter.
Note: You don't have to worry about Solr shards necessarily. Solr will index most DBs and HDFS directly but only the index is sharded. You shard an index if you have a very big one, you replicate it if you have lots of queries/second (or for failover). Solr queries are generally very fast so I'd worry about that after you have a functioning system since it's a config thing and shouldn't be affected by the rest of your workflow.

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