Chapter 11. Administering your cluster
This chapter covers
- Improving default configuration settings
- Creating default index settings with templates
- Monitoring for performance
- Using backup and restore
We’ve covered a lot of material in this book, and we hope you now feel comfortable working with the Elasticsearch APIs. In this chapter you’ll augment the APIs you’ve learned thus far and use them with the goal of monitoring and tuning your Elasticsearch cluster for increasing performance and implementing disaster recovery.
Both developers and administrators will eventually be faced with the prospect of having to monitor and administer their Elasticsearch cluster. Whether your system is under high or moderate use, it will be important for you to understand and identify bottlenecks and be prepared in the event of a hardware or system failure.
This chapter covers Elasticsearch cluster administration operations using the REST API, which you should now feel comfortable with, given the exposure throughout this book. This will enable you to identify and address possible performance bottlenecks, using real-time monitoring and best practices.
To that end, we’ll cover three overarching topics: improving defaults, monitoring for problems, and effectively using the backup system, with the simple premise that effective performance monitoring is necessary for system optimization and that understanding your system will aid in the planning of disaster scenarios.