Ingest your data

The best ingest option(s) for your use case depends on whether you are indexing general content or time series (timestamped) data.

You can use the Elasticsearch REST APIs to add data to your Elasticsearch indices, using any HTTP client, including the Elasticsearch client libraries.

While the Elasticsearch APIs can be used for any data type, Elastic provides specialized tools that optimize ingestion for specific use cases.

General content is typically text-heavy data that does not have a timestamp. This could be data like knowledge bases, website content, product catalogs, and more.

You can use these specialized tools to add general content to Elasticsearch indices:

Time series, or timestamped data, describes data that changes frequently and "flows" over time, such as stock quotes, system metrics, and network traffic data.

You can use these specialized tools to add timestamped data to Elasticsearch data streams: