Before you begin reading this guide, we recommend you run Elasticsearch Error Check-Up which can resolve issues that cause many errors.
This guide will help you check for common problems that cause the log ” Failed to delete shard snapshot file ” to appear. It’s important to understand the issues related to the log, so to get started, read the general overview on common issues and tips related to the Elasticsearch concepts: blobstore, delete, discovery-file, repositories and repository-azure.
Advanced users might want to skip right to the common problems section in each concept or try running the Check-Up which analyses ES to pinpoint the cause of many errors and provides suitable actionable recommendations how to resolve them (free tool that requires no installation).
Overview
DELETE is an Elasticsearch API which removes a document from a specific index. This API requires an index name and _id document to delete the document.
Delete a document
DELETE /my_index/_doc/1
Notes
- A delete request throws 404 error code if the document does not already exist in the index.
- If you want to delete a set of documents that matches a query, you need to use delete by query API.
Log Context
Log “[{}] [{}] failed to delete shard snapshot file” classname is BlobStoreRepository.java
We extracted the following from Elasticsearch source code for those seeking an in-depth context :
int fileListGeneration = tuple.v2(); try { indexShardSnapshotFormat.delete(blobContainer; snapshotId.getUUID()); } catch (IOException e) { logger.warn(new ParameterizedMessage("[{}] [{}] failed to delete shard snapshot file"; shardId; snapshotId); e); } // Build a list of snapshots that should be preserved ListnewSnapshotsList = new ArrayList(); for (SnapshotFiles point : snapshots) {
Run the Check-Up to get customized recommendations like this:

Heavy merges detected in specific nodes

Description
A large number of small shards can slow down searches and cause cluster instability. Some indices have shards that are too small…

Recommendations Based on your specific ES deployment you should…
Based on your specific ES deployment you should…
X-PUT curl -H [a customized code snippet to resolve the issue]