Getting Started

This getting started guide walks you through installing Watcher and creating your first watches, and introduces the building blocks you’ll use to create custom watches. You can install Watcher on nodes running Elasticsearch 1.5 or later.

To install and run Watcher:

Run bin/plugin -i from ES_HOME to install the License plugin:
```
bin/plugin -i elasticsearch/license/latest
```
You need to install the License and Watcher plugins on each node in your cluster.
Run bin/plugin -i to install the Watcher plugin.
```
bin/plugin -i elasticsearch/watcher/latest
```
If you are using a DEB/RPM distribution of Elasticsearch, run the installation with superuser permissions. To perform an offline installation, download the Watcher binaries.
Start Elasticsearch.
```
bin/elasticsearch
```

To verify that Watcher is set up, call the Watcher _stats API:

curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/_watcher/stats?pretty'

You haven’t set up any watches yet, so the watch_count is zero and the execution_thread_pool queue is empty:

{
  "watcher_state": "started",
  "watch_count": 0,
  "execution_thread_pool": {
    "queue_size": 0,
    "max_size": 0
  }
}

Ready to start building watches? Choose one of the following scenarios:

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