cat health

health is a terse, one-line representation of the same information from /_cluster/health.

GET /_cat/health?v

epoch      timestamp cluster       status node.total node.data shards pri relo init unassign pending_tasks max_task_wait_time active_shards_percent
1475871424 16:17:04  elasticsearch green           1         1      5   5    0    0        0             0                  -                100.0%

It has one option ts to disable the timestamping:

GET /_cat/health?v&ts=false

which looks like:

cluster       status node.total node.data shards pri relo init unassign pending_tasks max_task_wait_time active_shards_percent
elasticsearch green           1         1      5   5    0    0        0             0                  -                100.0%

A common use of this command is to verify the health is consistent across nodes:

% pssh -i -h list.of.cluster.hosts curl -s localhost:9200/_cat/health
[1] 20:20:52 [SUCCESS] es3.vm
1384309218 18:20:18 foo green 3 3 3 3 0 0 0 0
[2] 20:20:52 [SUCCESS] es1.vm
1384309218 18:20:18 foo green 3 3 3 3 0 0 0 0
[3] 20:20:52 [SUCCESS] es2.vm
1384309218 18:20:18 foo green 3 3 3 3 0 0 0 0

A less obvious use is to track recovery of a large cluster over time. With enough shards, starting a cluster, or even recovering after losing a node, can take time (depending on your network & disk). A way to track its progress is by using this command in a delayed loop:

% while true; do curl localhost:9200/_cat/health; sleep 120; done
1384309446 18:24:06 foo red 3 3 20 20 0 0 1812 0
1384309566 18:26:06 foo yellow 3 3 950 916 0 12 870 0
1384309686 18:28:06 foo yellow 3 3 1328 916 0 12 492 0
1384309806 18:30:06 foo green 3 3 1832 916 4 0 0
^C

In this scenario, we can tell that recovery took roughly four minutes. If this were going on for hours, we would be able to watch the UNASSIGNED shards drop precipitously. If that number remained static, we would have an idea that there is a problem.

You typically are using the health command when a cluster is malfunctioning. During this period, it’s extremely important to correlate activities across log files, alerting systems, etc.

There are two outputs. The HH:MM:SS output is simply for quick human consumption. The epoch time retains more information, including date, and is machine sortable if your recovery spans days.