Elasticsearch reserve node - elasticsearch

I have 4-nodes elasticsearch cluster (1 of them is client, es 1.3.5).
It works fine most of time, but sometimes on peaks gone out of resources.
Can i add any reserve node in cluster that will be enabled only when peaks occured (1-2 day in months) and will be disabled all other time? Does it makes sense?

There's no notion of backup/standby/reserve node. You monitor the cluster activity and you start a new node when the peak happens. If you would have used a newer version you could have used Marvel (the monitoring part) and Watcher (the alerting part) to get notified on the peaks. At that point you could have started the new node.
There are also examples of watches that alert you in case of high memory or cpu usage: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/watcher/current/watching-marvel-data.html#watching-memory-usage

Related

Elastic 6.1 replication speed capped?

I'm playing with Elastic 6.1.1 and testing the limit of the software.
If I take an index of ~ 300GB with 0 replicas and 10 data nodes, and then decide to add a replica, all Elastic instances are massively using network (but not CPU). This is a normal behaviour :)
But it appears network usage is somewhat "capped" - considering network graphs - to 160Mbps (20MiB/sec). This limit is strange as it was default throttle limit on previous versions of Elastic (indices.store.throttle.max_bytes_per_sec), but this variable was deleted starting with Elastic 2.X
I wonder what is this cap, and how I could remove it.
I tried raising index.merge.scheduler.max_thread_count with no effect ...
Do you see any other tuning that can be done in that end ?
Any feedback welcome !
You have this - https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/6.1/recovery.html - which limits the transfer rate of anything related to copying shard from node to node. You can start playing with it by increasing it gradually and see what the impact is on the cluster performance.
Also, you have https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/6.1/shards-allocation.html#_shard_allocation_settings which also affects the traffic between nodes when copying shards.

ElasticSearch stats API taking long time to response

We have an ES cluster at AWS running with the following setup:
(I know, i need minimum 3 master nodes)
1 Coordinator
2 Data nodes
1 Master Node
Data nodes spec:
CPU: 8 Cores
Ram: 20GB
Disk: 1TB ssd 4000 IOPS
Problem:
ES endpoints for Search, Delete, Backup, Cluster Heatlh, Insert are working fine.
Since yesterday some endpoints like /_cat/indices, /_nodes/_local/stats and etc, started to take too long to respond(more than 4 minutes) :( and consequently our Kibana is in red state(Timeout after 30000ms)
Useful info:
All Shards are OK (3500 in total)
The cluster is in green state
X-pack disabled
Average of 1gb/shard
500k document count.
Requests made by localhost at AWS
CPU, DISK, RAM, IOPS all fine
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance :)
EDIT/SOLUTION 1:
After a few days i found out what was the problem, but first a little bit context...
We use Elasticsearch for storing user audit messages, and mobile error messages, at the first moment (obiviously in a rush to deliver new microservices and remove load from our MongoDB cluster) we designed elasticsearch indices by day, so every day a new indice was created and at the end of the day that indice had arround 6 ~ 9gb of data.
Six months later, almost 180 indices bigger, and 720 primary shards open we bumped into this problem.
Then i did read this again(the basics!) :
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/_basic_concepts.html
After talking to the team responsible for this microservice we redesigned our indices to a monthly index, and guess what? problem solved!
Now our cluster is much faster than before and this simple command saved me some sweet nights of sleep.
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/docs-reindex.html
Thanks!

optimize elasticsearch / JVM

I have a website for classified. For this I'm using elasticsearch, postgres and rails on a same ubuntu 14.04 dedicated server, with 256GB of RAM and 20 cores, 40 threads.
I have 10 indexes on elasticsearch, each have default numbers of shards (5). They have between 1000 and 400 000 classifieds depending on which index.
approximately 5000 requests per minute, 2/3 making an elasticsearch request.
according to htop, jvm is using around 500% of CPU
I try different options, I reduce number of shards per index, I also try to change JAVA_OPTS as followed
#JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -XX:+UseParNewGC"
#JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC"
#JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=75"
#JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -XX:+UseCMSInitiatingOccupancyOnly"
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -XX:+UseG1GC"
but it doesn't seems to change anything.
so to questions :
when you change any setting on elasticsearch, and then restart, should the improvement (if any) be visible immediately or can it arrive a bit later thanks to cache or anything else ?
can any one help me to find good configuration for JVM / elasticsearch so it will not take that many resources
First, it's a horrible idea to run your web server, database and Elasticsearch server all on the same box. Each of these should be given it's own box, at least. In the case of Elasticsearch, it's actually recommended to have at least 3 servers, or nodes. That way you end up with a load balanced cluster that won't run into split-brain issues.
Further, sharding only makes sense in a cluster. If you only have one node, then all the shards reside on the same node. This causes two performance problems. First, you get the hit that sharding always adds. For every query, Elasticsearch must query each shard individually (each is a separate Lucene index). Then, it must combine and process the result from all the shards to produce the final result. That's a not insignificant amount of overhead. Second, because all the shards reside on the same node, you're I/O-locked. The shards have to be queried one at a time instead of all at once. Optimally, you should have one shard per node, however, since you can't create more shards without reindexing, it's common to have a few extra hanging around for future horizontal scaling. In that scenario, the cost of reindexing what could be 100's of gigs of data or more outweighs a little bit of performance bottleneck. However, if you've got 5 shards running one node, that's probably a large part of your performance problems right there.
Finally, and again, with Elasticsearch in particular, swapping is a huge no-no. Most of what makes Elasticsearch efficient is it's cache which all resides in RAM. If swaps occur, it jacks with the cache in sometimes unpredictable ways. As result, it's recommended to turn off swapping completely on the box your node(s) run on, and set Elasticsearch/JVM to have a min and max memory consumption of roughly half the available RAM of the box. That's virtually impossible to achieve if you have other things running on it like a web server or database. Databases in particular aggressively consume RAM in order to increase throughput, which is why those should likewise reside on their own servers.

ElasticSearch/Logstash/Kibana How to deal with spikes in log traffic

What is the best way to deal with a surge in log messages being written to an ElasticSearch cluster in a standard ELK setup?
We use a standard ELK (ElasticSearch/Logstash/Kibana) set-up in AWS for our websites logging needs.
We have an autoscaling group of Logstash instances behind a load balancer, that log to an autoscaling group of ElasticSearch instances behind another load balancer. We then have a single instance serving Kibana.
For day to day business we run 2 Logstash instances and 2 ElasticSearch instances.
Our website experiences short periods of high level traffic during events - our traffic increases by about 2000% during these events. We know about these occurring events well in advance.
Currently we just increase the number of ElasticSearch instances temporarily during the event. However we have had issues where we have subsequently scaled down too quickly, meaning we have lost shards and corrupted our indexes.
I've been thinking of setting the auto_expand_replicas setting to "1-all" to ensure each node has a copy of all the data, so we don't need to worry about how quickly we scale up or down. How significant would the overhead of transferring all the data to new nodes be? We currently only keep about 2 weeks of log data - this works out around 50gb in all.
I've also seen people mention using a separate auto scaling group of non-data nodes to deal with increases of search traffic, while keep the number of data nodes the same. Would this help in a write heavy situation, such as the event I previously mentioned?
My Advice
Your best bet is using Redis as a broker in between Logstash and Elasticsearch:
This is described on some old Logstash docs but is still pretty relevant.
Yes, you will see a minimal delay between the logs being produced and them eventually landing in Elasticsearch, but it should be minimal as the latency between Redis and Logstash is relatively small. In my experience Logstash tends to work through the backlog on Redis pretty quickly.
This kind of setup also gives you a more robust setup where even if Logstash goes down, you're still accepting the events through Redis.
Just scaling Elasticsearch
As to your question on whether or not extra non-data nodes will help in write-heavy periods: I don't believe so, no. Non-data nodes are great when you're seeing lots of searches (reads) being performed, as they delegate the search to all the data nodes, and then aggregate the results before sending them back to the client. They take away the load of aggregating the results from the data nodes.
Writes will always involve your data nodes.
I don't think adding and removing nodes is a great way to cater for this.
You can try to tweak the thread pools and queues in your peak periods. Let's say normally you have the following:
threadpool:
index:
type: fixed
size: 30
queue_size: 1000
search
type: fixed
size: 30
queue_size: 1000
So you have an even amount of search and index threads available. Just before your peak time, you can change the setting (on the run) to the following:
threadpool:
index:
type: fixed
size: 50
queue_size: 2000
search
type: fixed
size: 10
queue_size: 500
Now you have a lot more threads doing indexing, allowing for a faster indexing throughput, while search is put on the backburner. For good measure I've also increased the queue_size to allow for more of a backlog to build up. This might not work as expected, though, and experimentation and tweaking is recommended.

Hadoop data nodes die very often

Our Hadoop cluster is a cluster of 5 data nodes and 2 name nodes. The traffic is actually very high and a few nodes go down very often. But they come back after a while. Some times it takes a long time, more than half an hour to come back alive.
There are few DNs with more threads than the others. Is this a configuration problem?
The data is not write intensive. MR jobs run every 20 minutes.
After running a health monitor for two days, sampled at half an hour interval, we came to know that the nodes die during disk verification which runs every 6 hours. So now the nodes die predictably. But why do they die during disk verification? Is there anyway to prevent the nodes die during the disk verification??
Clouedera's capacity planning gives an insight on this. If you see “Bad connect ack with firstBadLink”, “Bad connect ack”, “No route to host”, or “Could not obtain block” IO exceptions under heavy loads, chances are these are due to a bad network.

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