Add Elasticsearch user settings

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Change how Elasticsearch runs by providing your own user settings. User settings are appended to the elasticsearch.yml configuration file for your cluster and provide custom configuration options. Elastic Cloud Enterprise supports many of the user settings for the version of Elasticsearch that your cluster is running.

Some settings that could break your cluster if set incorrectly are blacklisted, such as certain zen discovery and security settings. For examples of a few of the settings that are generally safe in cloud environments, see Additional Examples of Supported User Settings and Editing Your User Settings that can be enabled on our Elastic Cloud hosted offering.

To add user settings:

  1. Log into the Cloud UI.
  2. On the Deployments page, select your deployment.

    Narrow the list by name, ID, or choose from several other filters. To further define the list, use a combination of filters.

  3. From your deployment menu, go to the Edit page.
  4. At the bottom of the first Elasticsearch node, expand the User settings overrides caret.
  5. Update the user settings.
  6. Click Save changes.

Example: Enable email notifications from Gmail

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The following examples configure email notifications to Gmail for a user that you specify. Which example you use depends on the version of Elasticsearch that your cluster is running.

For version 6.3 and later: See Configuring email actions.

For version 5.0 to 6.2: See Configuring email actions.

xpack.notification.email.account:
    gmail_account:
        profile: gmail
        smtp:
            auth: true
            starttls.enable: true
            host: smtp.gmail.com
            port: 587
            user: <username>
            password: <password>

For versions before 5.0: Use Watcher to configure an email watch action. To learn more, see Configuring Email Actions.

watcher.actions.email.service.account:
  work:
    profile: gmail
    email_defaults:
      from: <email>
    smtp:
      auth: true
      starttls.enable: true
      host: smtp.gmail.com
      port: 587
      user: <username>
      password: <password>

Additional examples of supported user settings

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These example user settings cover only a subset of all user settings that you can include in the elasticsearch.yml configuration file. To learn more about available settings, see Configuring Elasticsearch.

Examples of Elasticsearch user settings that you can specify:

cluster.indices.close.enable

Enables closing indices in Elasticsearch version 2.2 and later. You might enable this setting temporarily in order to change the analyzer configuration for an existing index. We strongly recommend leaving this set to false (the default) otherwise. Closed indices are a data loss risk: If you close an index, it is not included in snapshots and you will not be able to restore the data. Similarly, closed indices are not included when you when you make cluster configuration changes, such as scaling to a different capacity, failover, and many other operations. Lastly, closed indices can lead to inaccurate disk space counts.

Closed indices are a data loss risk. Enable this setting only temporarily.

reindex.remote.whitelist
Whitelists the hosts that can be reindexed from remotely. Consists of a comma-delimited list of host:port entries. Defaults to ["\*.io:*", "\*.com:*"].
script.painless.regex.enabled
Enables regular expressions for the Painless scripting language.
X-Pack alerting features (formerly Watcher)

Enables watches, including integration with Slack, HipChat, and PagerDuty. For example:

For version 6.3 and later:

For version 5.0 to 6.2:

For versions before 5.0:

Remember to check your user settings when performing a major version upgrade. For version 5.0 and later, the syntax for alerts is different when compared to earlier versions, for example.

Disk-based shard allocation settings

The following disk-based allocation settings are supported:

cluster.routing.allocation.disk.watermark.low
Configures disk-based shard allocation’s low watermark.
cluster.routing.allocation.disk.watermark.high
Configures disk-based shard allocation’s high watermark.
cluster.routing.allocation.disk.watermark.flood_stage
Configures disk-based shard allocation’s flood_stage (available only on 6.x and higher).