Before you begin reading this guide, we recommend you run Elasticsearch Error Check-Up which analyzes 2 JSON files to detect many errors.
To easily locate the root cause and resolve this issue try AutoOps for Elasticsearch & OpenSearch. It diagnoses problems by analyzing hundreds of metrics collected by a lightweight agent and offers guidance for resolving them.
This guide will help you check for common problems that cause the log ” Exception trying to setParsedAggregations ” to appear. To understand the issues related to this log, read the explanation below about the following Elasticsearch concepts: aggregations and plugin.
Aggregation in Elasticsearch
Overview
In Elasticsearch an aggregation is a collection or the gathering of related things together. The aggregation framework collects all the data based on the documents that match a search request which helps in building summaries of the data. Unlike Elasticsearch facets, aggregations can be nested. So aggregations can have sub-aggregations that operated on the documents which are generated by parent aggregation. Below are the different types of aggregations, each aggregation has its own purpose:
Metrics Aggregations: Metric Aggregation mainly refers to the mathematical calculations performed on the documents present in the bucket based upon given search criteria. For example, if you choose a number field; then the metric calculations you can perform on it are COUNT, SUM, MIN, MAX, AVERAGE etc.
Bucket Aggregations: Bucket aggregations create buckets or sets of documents based on given criteria in query. When the aggregation is performed, the documents are placed in the respective bucket, at the end we get a list of buckets, each with a list of documents. Example of bucket aggregation is Histogram Aggregation, Range Aggregation, Terms Aggregation, Filter(s) Aggregations, Geo Distance Aggregation and IP Range Aggregation.
Pipeline Aggregations: These aggregations allow you to aggregate over the result of another aggregation rather than from document sets.
Matrix Aggregations: Unlike Metric and Bucket aggregations, this aggregation work on more than one field and produce a matrix result based on the values from the requested document fields.
Examples
This aggregation is used to get the average of any numeric field present in the aggregated documents. For example below query computes the average fees over all documents
POST /schools/_search { "aggs":{ "avg_fees":{"avg":{"field":"fees"}} } }
In query “aggs” object holds the aggregation to be computed. “avg_fees” is the name of the aggregation, “avg_fees” can be referred in scripts also and “avg” is the type of aggregation applied on fees field. The above will return the following:
{ ... "aggregations" : { "avg_fees" : { "value" : 2650.0 } } }
Overview
A plugin is used to enhance the core functionalities of Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch provides some core plugins as a part of their release installation. In addition to those core plugins, it is possible to write your own custom plugins as well. There are several community plugins available on GitHub for various use cases.
Examples
Get all of the instructions for the plugin:
sudo bin/elasticsearch-plugin -h
Installing the S3 plugin for storing Elasticsearch snapshots on S3:
sudo bin/elasticsearch-plugin install repository-s3
Removing a plugin:
sudo bin/elasticsearch-plugin remove repository-s3
Installing a plugin using the file’s path:
sudo bin/elasticsearch-plugin install file:///path/to/plugin.zip
Notes and good things to know
- Plugins are installed and removed using the elasticsearch-plugin script, which ships as a part of the Elasticsearch installation and can be found inside the bin/ directory of the Elasticsearch installation path.
- A plugin has to be installed on every node of the cluster and each of the nodes has to be restarted to make the plugin visible.
- You can also download the plugin manually and then install it using the elasticsearch-plugin install command, providing the file name/path of the plugin’s source file.
- When a plugin is removed, you will need to restart every Elasticsearch node in order to complete the removal process.
Common issues
- Managing permission issues during and after plugin installation is the most common problem. If Elasticsearch was installed using the DEB or RPM packages then the plugin has to be installed using the root user. Otherwise you can install the plugin as the user that owns all of the Elasticsearch files.
- In the case of DEB or RPM package installation, it is important to check the permissions of the plugins directory after you install it. You can update the permission if it has been modified using the following command:
chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch path_to_plugin_directory
- If your Elasticsearch nodes are running in a private subnet without internet access, you cannot install a plugin directly. In this case, you can simply download the plugins and copy the files inside the plugins directory of the Elasticsearch installation path on every node. The node has to be restarted in this case as well.
Log Context
Log “Exception trying to setParsedAggregations” classname is DatafeedConfig.java.
We extracted the following from Elasticsearch source code for those seeking an in-depth context :
public void setParsedAggregations(AggregatorFactories.Builder aggregations) { try { this.aggProvider = AggProvider.fromParsedAggs(aggregations); } catch (IOException exception) { // eat exception as it should never happen logger.error("Exception trying to setParsedAggregations"; exception); } } private void setAggregationsSafe(AggProvider aggProvider) { if (this.aggProvider != null) {