Data set quality

[beta] This functionality is in beta and is subject to change. The design and code is less mature than official GA features and is being provided as-is with no warranties. Beta features are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

The Data Set Quality page provides an overview of your log, metric, trace, and synthetic data sets. Use this information to get an idea of your overall data set quality and find data sets that contain incorrectly parsed documents.

To open Data Set Quality, find Stack Management in the main menu or use the global search field. By default, the page only shows log data sets. To see other data set types, select them from the Type menu.

The quality of your data sets is based on the percentage of degraded documents in each data set. A degraded document in a data set contains the _ignored property because one or more of its fields were ignored during indexing. Fields are ignored for a variety of reasons. For example, when the ignore_malformed parameter is set to true, if a document field contains the wrong data type, the malformed field is ignored and the rest of the document is indexed.

From the data set table, you’ll find information for each data set such as its namespace, size, when the data set was last active, and the percentage of degraded docs. The percentage of degraded documents determines the data set’s quality according to the following scale:

Opening the details of a specific data set shows the degraded documents history, a summary for the data set, and other details that can help you determine if you need to investigate any issues.

The Data Set Quality page has a couple of different ways to help you find ignored fields and investigate issues. From the data set table, you can open the data set’s details page, and view commonly ignored fields and information about those fields. Open a logs data set in Logs Explorer or other data set types in Discover to find ignored fields in individual documents.

To open the details page for a data set with poor or degraded quality and view ignored fields:

The Quality issues section shows fields that were ignored during ingest, the number of documents that contain ignored fields, and the timestamp of last occurrence of the field being ignored.

To use Logs Explorer or Discover to find ignored fields in individual documents:

The Documents table in Logs Explorer or Discover is automatically filtered to show documents that were not parsed correctly. Under the actions column, you’ll find the degraded document icon.

Now that you know which documents contain ignored fields, examine them more closely to find the origin of the issue:

Here, you’ll find all of the _ignored fields in the document and their values, which should provide some clues as to why the fields were ignored.