How to check Elasticsearch cluster health?

I tried to check it via

curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/_cluster/health'

but nothing happened. Seems it's waiting for something. The console did not come back. Had to kill it with CTRL+C.

I also tried to check for existing indices via

curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/_cat/indices?v'

Same behavior as above.

To check on elasticsearch cluster health you need to use

curl localhost:9200/_cat/health

More on the cat APIs here.

I usually use elasticsearch-head plugin to visualize that.

You can find it's github project here.

It's easy to install sudo $ES_HOME/bin/plugin -i mobz/elasticsearch-head and then you can open localhost:9200/_plugin/head/ in your web brower.

You should have something that looks like this :

You can check elasticsearch cluster health by using (CURL) and Cluster API provieded by elasticsearch:

$ curl -XGET 'localhost:9200/_cluster/health?pretty'

This will give you the status and other related data you need.

{
 "cluster_name" : "xxxxxxxx",
 "status" : "green",
 "timed_out" : false,
 "number_of_nodes" : 2,
 "number_of_data_nodes" : 2,
 "active_primary_shards" : 15,
 "active_shards" : 12,
 "relocating_shards" : 0,
 "initializing_shards" : 0,
 "unassigned_shards" : 0,
 "delayed_unassigned_shards" : 0,
 "number_of_pending_tasks" : 0,
 "number_of_in_flight_fetch" : 0
}

The _cluster/health API can do far more than the typical output that most see with it:

 $ curl -XGET 'localhost:9200/_cluster/health?pretty'

Most APIs within Elasticsearch can take a variety of arguments to augment their output. This applies to Cluster Health API as well.

Examples

$ curl -XGET 'localhost:9200/_cluster/health?level=indices&pretty' | head -50
{
  "cluster_name" : "rdu-es-01",
  "status" : "green",
  "timed_out" : false,
  "number_of_nodes" : 9,
  "number_of_data_nodes" : 6,
  "active_primary_shards" : 1106,
  "active_shards" : 2213,
  "relocating_shards" : 0,
  "initializing_shards" : 0,
  "unassigned_shards" : 0,
  "delayed_unassigned_shards" : 0,
  "number_of_pending_tasks" : 0,
  "number_of_in_flight_fetch" : 0,
  "task_max_waiting_in_queue_millis" : 0,
  "active_shards_percent_as_number" : 100.0,
  "indices" : {
    "filebeat-6.5.1-2019.06.10" : {
      "status" : "green",
      "number_of_shards" : 3,
      "number_of_replicas" : 1,
      "active_primary_shards" : 3,
      "active_shards" : 6,
      "relocating_shards" : 0,
      "initializing_shards" : 0,
      "unassigned_shards" : 0
    },
    "filebeat-6.5.1-2019.06.11" : {
      "status" : "green",
      "number_of_shards" : 3,
      "number_of_replicas" : 1,
      "active_primary_shards" : 3,
      "active_shards" : 6,
      "relocating_shards" : 0,
      "initializing_shards" : 0,
      "unassigned_shards" : 0
    },
    "filebeat-6.5.1-2019.06.12" : {
      "status" : "green",
      "number_of_shards" : 3,
      "number_of_replicas" : 1,
      "active_primary_shards" : 3,
      "active_shards" : 6,
      "relocating_shards" : 0,
      "initializing_shards" : 0,
      "unassigned_shards" : 0
    },
    "filebeat-6.5.1-2019.06.13" : {
      "status" : "green",
      "number_of_shards" : 3,

$ curl -XGET 'localhost:9200/_cluster/health?level=shards&pretty' | head -50
{
  "cluster_name" : "rdu-es-01",
  "status" : "green",
  "timed_out" : false,
  "number_of_nodes" : 9,
  "number_of_data_nodes" : 6,
  "active_primary_shards" : 1106,
  "active_shards" : 2213,
  "relocating_shards" : 0,
  "initializing_shards" : 0,
  "unassigned_shards" : 0,
  "delayed_unassigned_shards" : 0,
  "number_of_pending_tasks" : 0,
  "number_of_in_flight_fetch" : 0,
  "task_max_waiting_in_queue_millis" : 0,
  "active_shards_percent_as_number" : 100.0,
  "indices" : {
    "filebeat-6.5.1-2019.06.10" : {
      "status" : "green",
      "number_of_shards" : 3,
      "number_of_replicas" : 1,
      "active_primary_shards" : 3,
      "active_shards" : 6,
      "relocating_shards" : 0,
      "initializing_shards" : 0,
      "unassigned_shards" : 0,
      "shards" : {
        "0" : {
          "status" : "green",
          "primary_active" : true,
          "active_shards" : 2,
          "relocating_shards" : 0,
          "initializing_shards" : 0,
          "unassigned_shards" : 0
        },
        "1" : {
          "status" : "green",
          "primary_active" : true,
          "active_shards" : 2,
          "relocating_shards" : 0,
          "initializing_shards" : 0,
          "unassigned_shards" : 0
        },
        "2" : {
          "status" : "green",
          "primary_active" : true,
          "active_shards" : 2,
          "relocating_shards" : 0,
          "initializing_shards" : 0,
          "unassigned_shards" : 0

The API also has a variety of wait_* options where it'll wait for various state changes before returning immediately or after some specified timeout.