Ack Watch API

Acknowledging a watch enables you to manually throttle execution of the watch’s actions. An action’s acknowledgement state is stored in the _status.actions.<id>.ack.state structure.

To demonstrate let’s create a new watch:

PUT _xpack/watcher/watch/my_watch
{
  "trigger": {
    "schedule": {
      "hourly": {
        "minute": [ 0, 5 ]
      }
    }
  },
  "input": {
    "simple": {
      "payload": {
        "send": "yes"
      }
    }
  },
  "condition": {
    "always": {}
  },
  "actions": {
    "test_index": {
      "throttle_period": "15m",
      "index": {
        "index": "test",
        "doc_type": "test2"
      }
    }
  }
}

The current status of a watch and the state of its actions is returned with the watch definition when you call the Get Watch API:

GET _xpack/watcher/watch/my_watch

The action state of a newly-created watch is awaits_successful_execution:

{
  "found": true,
  "_id": "my_watch",
  "_status": {
    "version": 1,
    "actions": {
      "test_index": {
        "ack": {
          "timestamp": "2015-05-26T18:04:27.723Z",
          "state": "awaits_successful_execution"
        }
      }
    },
    "state": ...
  },
  "watch": ...
}

When the watch executes and the condition matches, the value of the ack.state changes to ackable. Let’s force execution of the watch and fetch it again to check the status:

POST _xpack/watcher/watch/my_watch/_execute
{
  "record_execution" : true
}

GET _xpack/watcher/watch/my_watch

and the action is now in ackable state:

{
  "found": true,
  "_id": "my_watch",
  "_status": {
    "version": 2,
    "actions": {
      "test_index": {
        "ack": {
          "timestamp": "2015-05-26T18:04:27.723Z",
          "state": "ackable"
        },
        "last_execution" : {
          "timestamp": "2015-05-25T18:04:27.723Z",
          "successful": true
        },
        "last_successful_execution" : {
          "timestamp": "2015-05-25T18:04:27.723Z",
          "successful": true
        }
      }
    },
    "state": ...,
    "last_checked": ...,
    "last_met_condition": ...
  },
  "watch": ...
}

Now we can acknowledge it:

PUT _xpack/watcher/watch/my_watch/_ack/test_index
GET _xpack/watcher/watch/my_watch

{
  "found": true,
  "_id": "my_watch",
  "_status": {
    "version": 3,
    "actions": {
      "test_index": {
        "ack": {
          "timestamp": "2015-05-26T18:04:27.723Z",
          "state": "acked"
        },
        "last_execution" : {
          "timestamp": "2015-05-25T18:04:27.723Z",
          "successful": true
        },
        "last_successful_execution" : {
          "timestamp": "2015-05-25T18:04:27.723Z",
          "successful": true
        }
      }
    },
    "state": ...,
    "last_checked": ...,
    "last_met_condition": ...
  },
  "watch": ...
}

Acknowledging an action throttles further executions of that action until its ack.state is reset to awaits_successful_execution. This happens when the condition of the watch is not met (the condition evaluates to false).

You can acknowledge multiple actions by assigning the actions parameter a comma-separated list of action ids:

POST _xpack/watcher/watch/my_watch/_ack/action1,action2

To acknowledge all of the actions of a watch, simply omit the actions parameter:

POST _xpack/watcher/watch/my_watch/_ack

If you acknowledge a watch while it is executing, the request blocks and waits for the watch execution to finish. For some watches, this can take a significant amount of time. By default, the acknowledge action has a timeout of 10 seconds. You can change the timeout setting by specifying the master_timeout parameter.

The following snippet shows how to change the default timeout of the acknowledge action to 30 seconds:

POST _xpack/watcher/watch/my_watch/_ack?master_timeout=30s