I have three different data sources which get updated at separate times each day. My first idea was to combine all the data into a single index but I'm wondering if it's more sensible to keep each data source in their own index. That way when a data source gets updated, I can just refresh one index.
When it comes to searching I'll just search all index. Is this a sensible approach or will it introduce a lot of overheads by separating it out.
James
If it makes sense to merge the indices you can do so, but if you want the flexibility of refreshing only one source - you should keep them separated.
I'm not sure if you're aware of aliases: you can define an alias that will include all the three indices - so that from a "user" perspective you don't have to search "all the indices" - it'll be transparent to the user that it's actually not a single index.
Related
I have a web app that is used to search and view documents in Elastic Search.
The goal now is to maintain two values.
1. How many times the document was fetched in total (life time views)
2. How many times the document was fetched in last 30 days.
Achieving the first is somewhat possible, but the second one seems to be a very hard problem.
The two values need to be part of the document as they will be used for sorting the results.
What is the best way to achieve this.
To maintain expiring data like that you will need to store each view with its timestamp. I suppose you could store them in an array in the ES document, but you're asking for trouble doing it like that, as the update operation that you'd need to call every time the document is viewed will have to delete and recreate the document (that's how ES does updates), and if two views happen at the same time it will be difficult to make sure they both get stored.
There are two ways to store the views, and make use of them in the query:
Put them in a separate store (could be a different index in ES if you like), and run a cron job or similar every day to update every item in the main index with the number of views from the last thirty days in the view store. Even with a lot of data it should be possible to make this quite efficient, depending on your choice of store for views.
Use the ElasticSearch parent/child datatype to store views in the same index as the main documents, as children. I'm not sure that I'd particularly recommend this approach, but I think it should be possible with aggregations to write a query that sorts primary documents by the number of children (filtered by date). It might be quite slow though.
I doubt there is any other way to do this with current versions of ES, because it doesn't support joining across indices. Either the data must be aggregated in advance onto the document, or it has to be available in the same index.
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!
I am looking at sending my App logs to Elastic (6.x) via FileBeat and Logstash. As mentioned in Configure the Logstash output and recommended elsewhere, it seems that I need add the Date to the Index name. The reason for doing so was that when the time came to delete old data, it was easier to delete an entire Index by date, rather than individual documents. Is this true?
If I should be following this recommendation of adding the Date to the Index Name, I’m curious what additional things I need to do to ensure seamless querying? By this I mean querying esp. in Kibana, for e.g. over the past day which would need to look at today’s index as well as yesterday’s index.
Speaking of querying in Kibana, is there a way of simply working with the base index name without the date stamp i.e. setting it up so that I do not see or have to deal with the date named indexes?
Edit: Kamal raised a good point that I have not provided any information about my cluster and my needs. The following is what I'm working with:
What is your daily data creation/expected count
I'm not sure. I don't expect anything more than a GB of data day, and no more than a couple of 100K documents a day. Since these are logs, I don't expect any updates to the documents once they are created.
Growth rate of the data in the future (1 year - 5 years)
At the moment, I don't see the growth rate to cross a GB a day.
How many teams are using the same cluster apart from yours if there is
any
The cluster would be used (actually queried) by just my team. We are about 5 right now, but I don't see more than 10 users (and that's not concurrent, just over a day or month)
Usage patterns, type of queries used etc.
I'm not sure, but there certainly would not be updates to the data other than deletions
Hardware details
I've not worked this out with management. For most part I expect 3 nodes. Also this is not critical i.e. if we lose all of our logs for some reason, I would not lose sleep over it.
First of all you need to take a step back and understand do you really need multiple index or single one(where you need to filter documents while querying using a date field for a particular date).
Some of questions you must have before you take on such decision
What is your daily data creation/expected count
Growth rate of the data in the future (1 year - 5 years)
How many teams are using the same cluster apart from yours if there is any
Usage patterns, type of queries used etc.
Hardware details
Advantages
In a way, having multiple indexes(with date field as its index name) would be more beneficial.
You can delete the old indexes without affecting new ones.
In case if you have to change the mapping, you can do so with the new index without affecting the old ones. Comparatively less overhead while for single index, you have to reindex all the documents which would take lot more time if size is pretty huge. And if this keeps happening every now and then, you would need to come up with solution where you have to execute such operations at the times of minimal usages. That means, it can harm productivity.
searching using multiple indexes still is convenient.
not really sure but its easier for scaling using multiple indexes.
Disadvantages are:
Additional shards are created for each and every index that can waste some storage space.
Overhead to maintain multiple indexes by monitoring/operations team.
At times can lead to over-creation of indexes.
No mapping changes and less documents insertion(in 100s or few 100s), it'd be better to use single index.
The only way and the only correct way to figure out what's best is to have a cluster that closely resembles the production one with data too resembling to production, try various configurations and see which solution fits best.
Speaking of querying in Kibana, is there a way of simply working with
the base index name without the date stamp i.e. setting it up so that
I do not see or have to deal with the date named indexes?
Yes there is. If you have indexes with names like logs-0001, logs-0002, you can use logs-* as indexname when you query.
Including date in an index name is a very common use case implemened by many Elasticsearch users. It helps with archiving/ purging old indices as you mentioned. You dont need to do anything additionally to be able to query. Setup your index basename as an index pattern for your indices for ex. logstash-* and you can query on that particular index pattern in Kibana.
We have a rather difficult set of requirements for our search engine replacement and they go as follows.
Every instance will have a unique schema, we have multiple client installations that we don't control that have varying data structures
Frequent updates, it's not uncommon for every record to have a field be updated in a single action. Some fields are updated frequently, others are never changed
Some of our fields can be very large (50mb+) though these are never changed and are rare in a data set.
We'd like to have near real-time search if possible
We're looking at making the fields that are updated semi-frequently/frequently into child documents. The issue with this is that we have a set of tags that change quite frequently on the record that we want to search against in near real time. There is a strong expectation in our application that when this data is modified that searching immediately reflect that. We've tried child documents, but they don't seem to update as quickly as we'd like over a large data set.
So the questions are as follows:
Are there strategies I'm not aware of for updating child documents quickly? Maybe a plugin? Right now we're only using the RESTFUL interface
Would it be better to store the data that isn't frequently changed in ES but keep the tags in a database? Possibly creating a plugin in ES that maps the two together? Would this plugin in be difficult? Ideally, we'd be able to mix our searches together (Tags+regular ES queries) in a boolean fashion including the tags stored in a table.
Hopefully this will be helpful to other people in this situation, here is the solution I came up with.
Use Child/Parent documents
There was a single parent that contained static information for the record that rarely/never changes (bulk of the data indexed)
Create child documents for other data I wanted to index so they could be indexed independently of the primary document
Since I had split the record data I wanted to index into static and non static documents, then broke that non static data into further child documents I was able to create a high throughput indexer. The total number of records to be indexed were split into sub chunks, which were then further split into their child document types. I would split these chunks out to various indexer instances which would then be only limited by the throughput of the data source or the ES cluster in determining how many documents could be indexed per second.
This was all done through the bulk API. Keeping the static data away from the frequently changing data allowed the frequently changed data to be updated quite quickly and this speed was only limited by the available hardware. It was a little tougher to craft queries using the child document clauses and aggregates but everything seemed to work.
Notes
There is a performance penalty to using parent/child documents which was a non issue for us considering what ES gave us over our previous solution but it may cause issues for other implementations.
The previous setting was all documents of one type were in the same index. But due to different forms (conceptually) of types, and for backing up purposes, I need multiple indices of a single type.
They will all be in the form _feed. While this setting is great in some circumstances, for
client.prepareGet(index, typename, ids).execute().actionGet(); // works great if you know in which index to search
it is useless, since no wildcards may be used. What I can do is use multiple multigets and interleave the results. This results in what I want, but increase the amount of queries significantly.
Assuming I know, for sure, only one document exist with a given index, is there a better way to query does than call a multiget on all _uids for each possible index?
The best way would be to develop a mechanism in your application that would allow you to deduce the index name from the id. But assuming that this is not possible or practical, you have pretty much only two choices. If you need realtime get, then your approach is the only way to do it. If realtime get is not a requirement, you can perform a search across all indices using ids filter. If the id list is small you can benefit from using routing on your search query. This way the search request will only be dispatch to the shards that might contain any of the ids listed in the query. However, if the list of ids is big enough to span most of the shards, it will not provide any benefit.