This topic describes how to create and manage index lifecycle policies for OpenSearch clusters.
Index State Management (ISM) of OpenSearch is a plugin that allows you to automate periodic, administrative operations on indexes by triggering them based on changes in the index age, index size, or number of documents. With ISM, you can define custom policies to automate index rollovers and deletion, thus optimizing cluster search performance or cutting storage costs. The procedure for using ISM is as follows:
For more information about ISM, see Index State Management.
The OpenSearch Dashboards GUI may vary depending on the software version. OpenSearch Dashboards 1.3.6 is used as an example here.
Figure 1 Configuring a policy

In the following example, a policy named policy1 is created. The ism_template part specifies the indexes to apply the policy to. After the policy is created, indexes whose names start with test are automatically associated with this policy.
PUT _plugins/_ism/policies/policy1{"policy": {"description": "an example policy","default_state": "hot","states": [// Ignore the states part.],"ism_template": {"index_patterns": ["test*"],"priority": 100}}}
You can bind a policy to one or more indexes, or associate a policy with an index template, so that the policy will be applied to all indexes created using this index template. Use this method when associating existing indexes with a lifecycle policy.
Figure 2 Apply policy

Figure 3 Selecting a policy

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.
The displayed page shows index policies configured for the current cluster.
For details, see Index State Management.