Failed to get node info for disconnecting – How to solve this Elasticsearch error

Overview

Any application that interfaces with Elasticsearch to index, update or search data, or to monitor and maintain Elasticsearch using various APIs can be considered a client

It is very important to configure clients properly in order to ensure optimum use of Elasticsearch resources.

Examples

There are many open-source client applications for monitoring, alerting and visualization, such as ElasticHQ, Elastalerts, and Grafana to name a few. On top of Elastic client applications such as filebeat, metricbeat, logstash and kibana that have all been designed to integrate with Elasticsearch.

However it is frequently necessary to create your own client application to interface with Elasticsearch. Below is a simple example of the python client (taken from the client documentation):

from datetime import datetime
from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch
es = Elasticsearch()

doc = {
    'author': 'Testing',
    'text': 'Elasticsearch: cool. bonsai cool.',
    'timestamp': datetime.now(),
}
res = es.index(index="test-index", doc_type='tweet', id=1, body=doc)
print(res['result'])

res = es.get(index="test-index", doc_type='tweet', id=1)
print(res['_source'])

es.indices.refresh(index="test-index")

res = es.search(index="test-index", body={"query": {"match_all": {}}})
print("Got %d Hits:" % res['hits']['total']['value'])
for hit in res['hits']['hits']:
    print("%(timestamp)s %(author)s: %(text)s" % hit["_source"])

All of the official Elasticsearch clients follow a similar structure, working as light wrappers around the Elasticsearch rest API, so if you are familiar with Elasticsearch query structure they are usually quite straightforward to implement.

Notes and Good Things to Know

Use official Elasticsearch libraries.

Although it is possible to connect with Elasticsearch using any HTTP method, such as a curl request, the official Elasticsearch libraries have been designed to properly implement connection pooling and keep-alives.   

Official Elasticsearch clients are available for java, javascript, Perl, PHP, python, ruby and .NET. Many other programming languages are supported by community versions.

Keep your Elasticsearch version and client versions in sync.

To avoid surprises, always keep your client versions in line with the Elasticsearch version you are using. Always test clients with Elasticsearch since even minor version upgrades can cause issues due to dependencies or a need for code changes. 

Load balance across appropriate nodes.

Make sure that the client properly load balances across all of the appropriate nodes in the cluster.  In small clusters this will normally mean only across data nodes (never master nodes), or in larger clusters, all dedicated coordinating nodes (if implemented) .

Ensure that the Elasticsearch application properly handles exceptions.

In the case of Elasticsearch being unable to cope with the volume of requests, designing a client application to handle this gracefully (such as through some sort of queueing mechanism) will be better than simply inundating a struggling cluster with repeated requests.

Overview

To put it simply, a node is a single server that is part of a cluster. Each node is assigned one or more roles, which describe the node’s responsibility and operations. Data nodes store the data, and participate in the cluster’s indexing and search capabilities, while master nodes are responsible for managing the cluster’s activities and storing the cluster state, including the metadata.

While it is possible to run several node instances of Elasticsearch on the same hardware, it’s considered a best practice to limit a server to a single running instance of Elasticsearch.

Nodes connect to each other and form a cluster by using a discovery method. 

Roles

Master node

Master nodes are in charge of cluster-wide settings and changes – deleting or creating indices and fields, adding or removing nodes and allocating shards to nodes. Each cluster has a single master node that is elected from the master eligible nodes using a distributed consensus algorithm and is reelected if the current master node fails.

Coordinating (client) node

There is some confusion in the use of coordinating node terminology. Client nodes were removed from Elasticsearch after version 2.4 and became coordinating nodes.

Coordinating nodes are nodes that do not hold any configured role. They don’t hold data and are not part of the master eligible group nor execute ingest pipelines. Coordinating nodes serve incoming search requests and act as the query coordinator running query and fetch phases, sending requests to every node that holds a shard being queried. The coordinating node also distributes bulk indexing operations and route queries to shards based on the node’s responsiveness.