Percentiles Aggregation

The percentile metric supports scripting. For example, if our load times are in milliseconds but we want percentiles calculated in seconds, we could use a script to convert them on-the-fly:

{
    "aggs" : {
        "load_time_outlier" : {
            "percentiles" : {
                "script" : {
                    "lang": "painless",
                    "inline": "doc['load_time'].value / params.timeUnit", 
                    "params" : {
                        "timeUnit" : 1000   
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

This will interpret the script parameter as an inline script with the painless script language and no script parameters. To use a file script use the following syntax:

{
    "aggs" : {
        "load_time_outlier" : {
            "percentiles" : {
                "script" : {
                    "file": "my_script",
                    "params" : {
                        "timeUnit" : 1000
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

There are many different algorithms to calculate percentiles. The naive implementation simply stores all the values in a sorted array. To find the 50th percentile, you simply find the value that is at my_array[count(my_array) * 0.5].

Clearly, the naive implementation does not scale — the sorted array grows linearly with the number of values in your dataset. To calculate percentiles across potentially billions of values in an Elasticsearch cluster, approximate percentiles are calculated.

The algorithm used by the percentile metric is called TDigest (introduced by Ted Dunning in Computing Accurate Quantiles using T-Digests).

When using this metric, there are a few guidelines to keep in mind:

The following chart shows the relative error on a uniform distribution depending on the number of collected values and the requested percentile:

It shows how precision is better for extreme percentiles. The reason why error diminishes for large number of values is that the law of large numbers makes the distribution of values more and more uniform and the t-digest tree can do a better job at summarizing it. It would not be the case on more skewed distributions.

Approximate algorithms must balance memory utilization with estimation accuracy. This balance can be controlled using a compression parameter:

{
    "aggs" : {
        "load_time_outlier" : {
            "percentiles" : {
                "field" : "load_time",
                "tdigest": {
                  "compression" : 200 
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

The TDigest algorithm uses a number of "nodes" to approximate percentiles — the more nodes available, the higher the accuracy (and large memory footprint) proportional to the volume of data. The compression parameter limits the maximum number of nodes to 20 * compression.

Therefore, by increasing the compression value, you can increase the accuracy of your percentiles at the cost of more memory. Larger compression values also make the algorithm slower since the underlying tree data structure grows in size, resulting in more expensive operations. The default compression value is 100.

A "node" uses roughly 32 bytes of memory, so under worst-case scenarios (large amount of data which arrives sorted and in-order) the default settings will produce a TDigest roughly 64KB in size. In practice data tends to be more random and the TDigest will use less memory.

HDR Histogram (High Dynamic Range Histogram) is an alternative implementation that can be useful when calculating percentiles for latency measurements as it can be faster than the t-digest implementation with the trade-off of a larger memory footprint. This implementation maintains a fixed worse-case percentage error (specified as a number of significant digits). This means that if data is recorded with values from 1 microsecond up to 1 hour (3,600,000,000 microseconds) in a histogram set to 3 significant digits, it will maintain a value resolution of 1 microsecond for values up to 1 millisecond and 3.6 seconds (or better) for the maximum tracked value (1 hour).

The HDR Histogram can be used by specifying the method parameter in the request:

{
    "aggs" : {
        "load_time_outlier" : {
            "percentiles" : {
                "field" : "load_time",
                "percents" : [95, 99, 99.9],
                "hdr": { 
                  "number_of_significant_value_digits" : 3 
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

The HDRHistogram only supports positive values and will error if it is passed a negative value. It is also not a good idea to use the HDRHistogram if the range of values is unknown as this could lead to high memory usage.

The missing parameter defines how documents that are missing a value should be treated. By default they will be ignored but it is also possible to treat them as if they had a value.

{
    "aggs" : {
        "grade_percentiles" : {
            "percentiles" : {
                "field" : "grade",
                "missing": 10 
            }
        }
    }
}