Configure monitoring indexes

Background information

By default, the X-Pack monitoring component collects monitoring data from an Elasticsearch cluster at intervals of 10 seconds and saves the data to the indexes whose names start with .monitoring-* in the cluster. The .monitoring-es-6-* and .monitoring-kibana-6-* indexes are used to store monitoring data. The two types of indexes are rolled over every day. The name of a .monitoring-es-6-* index ends with the date when the monitoring data is saved.

A .monitoring-es-6-* index stores information about the cluster status, cluster statistics, node statistics, and index statistics. Such indexes consume a large amount of disk space.

Prerequisites

An Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch cluster is created. For more information, see Create an Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch cluster. In this example, an Elasticsearch V6.7 cluster of the Standard Edition is created.

Procedure

1. Log on to the Kibana console of your Elasticsearch cluster and go to the homepage of the Kibana console as prompted.
   For more information about how to log on to the Kibana console, see Log on to the Kibana console.

   Note In this example, an Elasticsearch V6.7.0 cluster is used. Operations on clusters of other versions may differ. The actual operations in the console prevail.
2. In the left-side navigation pane, click Monitoring.
3. In the Elasticsearch section, click Indices.
   
4. On the Indices tab, turn on System indices to query the disk space that is occupied by monitoring indexes.
   
5. In the left-side navigation pane, click Dev Tools.
6. On the Console tab, configure monitoring indexes.
   By default, the system monitoring indexes whose names start with .monitoring-es-* are generated by Elasticsearch at 08:00 UTC+8 and store monitoring data generated over the last seven days. The system monitoring indexes occupy the storage space of an Elasticsearch cluster. The size of the system monitoring indexes is related to the number of indexes (including system indexes) and the number of nodes in the Elasticsearch cluster. You can use one or both of the following methods to reduce the disk space consumed by the indexes that store the monitoring data:

   • Specify the index retention duration.

     PUT _cluster/settings
     {"persistent": {"xpack.monitoring.history.duration":"1d"}}

     You can specify the index retention duration based on your business requirements. The minimum retention duration is one day.

   • Specify the indexes that you want to monitor.
     Call the related API operation to specify the indexes that you want to monitor or the indexes that do not need to be monitored. This helps reduce the disk space occupied by the .monitoring-es-6-* indexes. The following code shows how to prohibit the monitoring of system indexes.

     PUT _cluster/settings
     {"persistent": {"xpack.monitoring.collection.indices": "*,-.*"}}

     Note The excluded indexes are not displayed on the Monitoring page in the Kibana console. However, these indexes are listed in the index list that is obtained by calling the GET _cat/indices operation. The status of the indexes is also displayed in the index list. The indexes can be in the open or close state.