Opster Team
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 ” Time cluster setting with value is missing units. assuming default units (ms) but in future versions this will be a hard error ” to appear. To understand the issues related to this log, read the explanation below about the following Elasticsearch concepts: cluster and metadata.
Overview
Metadata in Elasticsearch refers to additional information stored for each document. This is achieved using the specific metadata fields available in Elasticsearch. The default behavior of some of these metadata fields can be customized during mapping creation.
Examples
Using _meta meta-field for storing application-specific information with the mapping:
PUT /my_index?pretty { "mappings": { "_meta": { "domain": "security", "release_information": { "date": "18-01-2020", "version": "7.5" } } } }
Notes
- In version 2.x, Elasticsearch had a total 13 meta fields available, which are: _index, _uid, _type, _id, _source, _size, _all, _field_names, _timestamp, _ttl, _parent, _routing, _meta
- In version 5.x, _timestamp and _ttl meta fields were removed.
- In version 6.x, the _parent meta field was removed.
- In version 7.x, _uid and _all meta fields were removed.

Log Context
Log “time cluster setting [{}] with value [{}] is missing units; assuming default units (ms) but in future versions this will be a hard error” classname is MetaData.java.
We extracted the following from Elasticsearch source code for those seeking an in-depth context :
Long.parseLong(settingValue); } catch (NumberFormatException nfe) { continue; } // It's a naked number that previously would be interpreted as default unit (ms); now we add it: logger.warn("time cluster setting [{}] with value [{}] is missing units; assuming default units (ms) but in future versions this will be a hard error"; settingName; settingValue); if (newPersistentSettings == null) { newPersistentSettings = Settings.builder(); newPersistentSettings.put(metaData.persistentSettings()); } newPersistentSettings.put(settingName; settingValue + "ms");
Find & fix Elasticsearch problems
Opster AutoOps diagnoses & fixes issues in Elasticsearch based on analyzing hundreds of metrics.
Fix Your Cluster IssuesConnect in under 2 minutes
Matt Watson
CTO at Stackify