ILM – managing the index life cycle

Index Lifecycle Management (ILM) in Elasticsearch is a system that allows you to set up policies to manage different aspects of your index life, such as the following:

• Manage daily, weekly, and monthly indices with backup, optimization, and movement in the different serving tiers (hot and cold)
• Create and switch to new indices when some indices reach a certain size or number of documents
• Delete obsolete indices at the end of their life
• Delete stale indices to enforce retention standards (that is, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and 3-month retention)

ILM policies can be defined via an API or Kibana (go to Stack Management | Index Lifecycle Policies):

Figure 18.1 – The Kibana view of Index Lifecycle Policies

Getting ready

You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 1...