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:

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.

PUT /_template/custom_monitoring
{
    "index_patterns": ".monitoring-*",
    "order": 1,
    "settings": {
        "number_of_shards": 5,
        "number_of_replicas": 2
    }
}

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.