Configuring indices for monitoring

Index templates are used to configure the indices that store the monitoring data collected from a cluster.

You can retrieve the templates through the _template API:

  1. GET /_template/.monitoring-*

By default, the template configures one shard and one replica for the monitoring indices. To override the default settings, add your own template:

  1. Set the template pattern to .monitoring-*.
  2. Set the template order to 1. This ensures your template is applied after the default template, which has an order of 0.
  3. Specify the number_of_shards and/or number_of_replicas in the settings section.

For example, the following template increases the number of shards to five and the number of replicas to two.

  1. PUT /_template/custom_monitoring
  2. {
  3.   "index_patterns": ".monitoring-*",
  4.   "order": 1,
  5.   "settings": {
  6.     "number_of_shards": 5,
  7.     "number_of_replicas": 2
  8.   }
  9. }

Only set the number_of_shards and number_of_replicas in the settings section. Overriding other monitoring template settings could cause your monitoring dashboards to stop working correctly.