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 ” Unable to delete global metadata file ” to appear. To understand the issues related to this log, read the explanation below about the following Elasticsearch concepts: blobstore, delete, discovery-file, metadata and repositories.
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 “Unable to delete global metadata file [{}]” classname is BlobStoreRepository.java.
We extracted the following from Elasticsearch source code for those seeking an in-depth context :
} catch (IOException e) { if (snapshotInfo != null) { logger.warn(() -> new ParameterizedMessage("[{}] Unable to delete global metadata file [{}]"; snapshotInfo.snapshotId(); blobId); e); } else { logger.warn(() -> new ParameterizedMessage("Unable to delete global metadata file [{}]"; blobId); e); } } } private void deleteIndexMetaDataBlobIgnoringErrors(final SnapshotInfo snapshotInfo; final IndexId indexId) {