Creating and Managing Index Policies for an Elasticsearch Cluster

Context

1. Creating an Index Lifecycle Policy: Create an index lifecycle policy on OpenSearch Dashboards.
2. Associating Indexes with a Lifecycle Policy: Associate indexes with a lifecycle policy.
3. Managing Index Policies: Modify, retry, and change index lifecycle policies.

Constraints

• ISM is available only in Elasticsearch 7.6.2 clusters or later.
• You can customize policy names in Kibana.
• The Kibana GUI varies depending on the Kibana version. Kibana 7.6.2 is used as an example here.

Creating an Index Lifecycle Policy

1. Log in to the CSS management console.
2. In the navigation pane on the left, choose Clusters > Elasticsearch.
3. In the cluster list, find the target cluster, and click Kibana in the Operation column to log in to the Kibana console.
4. On the Kibana console, expand the menu in the upper-left corner, and choose IM or Index Management to go to the index management page.
5. Click Create policy to configure an index lifecycle policy.
   • Policy ID: use a custom policy name.
   • Define policy: define a custom policy based on the reference example provided.

   Figure 1 Configuring a policy

   
   
6. Click Create.

Associating Indexes with a Lifecycle Policy

• Method 1: Kibana commands

  On the Dev Tools page of Kibana, run the following command to associate a policy ID with an index template:

  PUT _template/<template_name> 
  {
      "index_patterns": ["index_name-*"],
      "settings": {
          "opendistro.index_state_management.policy_id": "policy_id"
      }
  }
  
  

  • <template_name>: Replace it with the name of a created index template.
  • policy_id: Replace it with a custom policy ID.

  For details about how to create an index template, see Index Template.

• Method 2: Kibana console
  1. On the Kibana console, choose IM or Index Management from the menu bar to go to the index management page.
  2. Select Indices on the left.

     Figure 2 Choosing Indices

     
     
  3. In the Indices list, select the target index to which you want to bind a policy.
  4. Click Apply policy in the upper right corner. In the displayed dialog box, select a policy ID.

     Figure 3 Adding an index policy

     
     

     Figure 4 Selecting a policy

     
     
  5. Click Apply.

     After you bind a policy to an index, ISM creates a job that runs every 5 minutes by default to execute the policy, check criteria, and change index states.

Managing Index Policies

1. On the Index Management page of the Kibana console, choose Managed Indices.

   The displayed page shows index policies configured for the current cluster.

2. Manage policies in the index policy list.
   • For a policy whose status is abnormal, click Retry policy.
   • To update a policy for an index, select the associated index, and click Change policy. After the policy is updated, click Change to apply the new policy.
   • To remove a policy from an index, select the index, and click Remove policy. In the displayed dialog box, click Remove.