How To Solve Issues Related to Log – Failed to execute pipeline for a bulk request

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Updated: Jan-20

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Troubleshooting background

To troubleshoot Elasticsearch log “Failed to execute pipeline for a bulk request” it’s important to understand common problems related to Elasticsearch concepts: bulk, request. See detailed explanations below complete with common problems, examples and useful tips.

Bulk in Elasticsearch

What it is

In Elasticsearch, when using the Bulk API it is possible to perform many write operations in a single API call, which increases the indexing speed. Using the Bulk API is more efficient than sending multiple, separate requests. This can be done for the following four actions:

  • Index
  • Update
  • Create 
  • Delete
Examples

The bellow bulk request will index a document, delete another document, and update an existing document.

POST _bulk
{ "index" : { "_index" : "myindex", "_id" : "1" } }
{ "field1" : "value" }
{ "delete" : { "_index" : “myindex", "_id" : "2" } }
{ "update" : {"_id" : "1", "_index" : "myindex"} }
{ "doc" : {"field2" : "value5"} }
Notes
  • Bulk API is useful when you need to index data streams that can be queued up and indexed in batches of hundreds or thousands, such as logs.
  • There is no correct number of actions or limits to perform on a single bulk call, but you will need to figure out the optimum number by experimentation, given the cluster size, number of nodes, hardware specs etc.

To help troubleshoot related issues we have gathered selected Q&A from the community and issues from Github , please review the following for further information :

1 Performance Issue: rejected execution of org.elasticsearch.ingest.PipelineExecutionSService ✔ – 0.42 K 

2 Failed To Execute Pipeline For A Bu    

Log Context

Log ”Failed to execute pipeline for a bulk request” classname is TransportBulkAction.java
We have extracted the following from Elasticsearch source code to get an in-depth context : 

<pre class="wp-block-syntaxhighlighter-code">                 logger.debug(() -> new ParameterizedMessage("failed to execute pipeline [{}] for document [{}/{}/{}]";
                    indexRequest.getPipeline(); indexRequest.index(); indexRequest.type(); indexRequest.id()); exception);
                bulkRequestModifier.markCurrentItemAsFailed(exception);
            }; (exception) -> {
                if (exception != null) {
                    logger.error("failed to execute pipeline for a bulk request"; exception);
                    listener.onFailure(exception);
                } else {
                    long ingestTookInMillis = TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS.toMillis(System.nanoTime() - ingestStartTimeInNanos);
                    BulkRequest bulkRequest = bulkRequestModifier.getBulkRequest();
                    ActionListener<BulkResponse> actionListener = bulkRequestModifier.wrapActionListenerIfNeeded(ingestTookInMillis;




</pre>
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