Snapshot lifecycle management API

The Snapshot Lifecycle Management APIs are used to manage policies for the time and frequency of automatic snapshots. Snapshot Lifecycle Management is related to Index Lifecycle Management, however, instead of managing a lifecycle of actions that are performed on a single index, SLM allows configuring policies spanning multiple indices. Snapshot Lifecycle Management can also perform deletion of older snapshots based on a configurable retention policy.

SLM policy management is split into three different CRUD APIs, a way to put or update policies, a way to retrieve policies, and a way to delete unwanted policies, as well as a separate API for immediately invoking a snapshot based on a policy.

SLM can be stopped temporarily and restarted using the Stop SLM and Start SLM APIs. To disable SLM’s functionality entirely, set the cluster setting xpack.slm.enabled to false in elasticsearch.yml.