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Rejected indexing

ECH

Elastic Cloud Hosted lets you manage and configure one or more deployments of the versioned Elastic Stack, hosted on Elastic Cloud.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

ECK

Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes extends Kubernetes orchestration capabilities to allow you to deploy and manage components of the Elastic Stack.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.

ECE

Elastic Cloud Enterprise is a self-managed orchestration platform for deploying and managing the Elastic Stack at scale.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.

Self-managed

Self-managed deployments are Elastic Stack deployments managed without the assistance of an orchestrator.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.

One or more nodes are rejecting indexing requests. Clients might lose data if they do not retry successfully.

Note

For a complete list of insights, refer to AutoOps insights.

Field Value
Component Elasticsearch
Severity High
Scope Node
Domains performance, indexing, stability

You can customize these settings to adjust when AutoOps detects this event and presents the insight. Refer to AutoOps event settings for details.

The default customization settings are:

Setting Type Default
Rejected indexing count threshold Integer 1
Consecutive samples above threshold Integer 1
Tip

Raising these thresholds reduces noise but delays detection. Lowering them triggers the insight sooner but can increase alerts during minor blips.

The following is an example of what you might see when this insight is triggered. Real insights use live data and links from your deployment or cluster.

Indexing requests are being rejected on es-data-01 and es-data-02.

  • Indices with high indexing activity: logs-prod-000045
Note

AutoOps shows different recommendations depending on how their conditions match your deployment or cluster.

Rollover indices

Condition: Shown when high-indexing activity is detected and if index has fewer primary shards than the available hot data nodes, or all data nodes when no hot role exists.

If logs-prod-000045 are time-based, roll them over and set 1 primary shards on the new write index so you can avoid a heavy segment merge on the current indices.

Rollover indices by shard size

Condition: Shown when high-indexing activity is detected and if primary shard size > 30GB.

If logs-prod-000045 are time-based, roll them over when average shard size reaches your target.

Review index templates and mappings

Condition: Shown when high-indexing activity is detected and for indexes with highest indexing latency.

Review templates and mappings for logs-prod-000045; they strongly affect indexing performance. Fix oversized mappings, unnecessary fields, and inefficient index settings.

Review indexing slow logs

Condition: Shown when indexing rejections occur on the node.

Enable indexing slow logs with the action below on logs-prod-000045, then review the logs to find slow index operations. On Elasticsearch 8.14+, set index.indexing.slowlog.include.user to true to record which user triggered a slow operation.

JSON
PUT logs-prod-000045/_settings
{
  "index.indexing.slowlog.threshold.index.warn": "10s",
  "index.indexing.slowlog.threshold.index.info": "5s",
  "index.indexing.slowlog.threshold.index.debug": "2s",
  "index.indexing.slowlog.threshold.index.trace": "500ms",
  "index.indexing.slowlog.source": "1000"
}
Note

Requires the manage index privilege. Requires Elasticsearch 8.0.0 or later. This action changes cluster or index configuration.

Add data node

Condition: Shown when high-indexing activity is detected and if index has more primary shards than the available hot data nodes, or all data nodes when no hot role exists.

Add a data node to increase capacity and reduce pressure on the existing nodes.

When Elasticsearch rejects indexing requests, writes fail at the client. Without successful retries, data can lag or be lost.

Rejections often follow sustained ingest pressure: a full or backed-up write thread pool, documents that do not match the index mapping, indices put into read-only mode at the flood-stage disk watermark, or circuit breakers that trip while processing bulks.

If rejections continue, ingest stays unreliable until pressure drops, mappings and disk pressure are fixed, or capacity increases.