Finding Searches that are Slowing Down your OpenSearch Cluster

By Opster Team

Updated: May 21, 2023

| 1 min read

It can be very difficult to understand what is going with your searches in OpenSearch. Without visibility, you can’t get a clear picture of what is happening in your system, which searches are slowing it down and how you can improve your overall performance. 

To achieve basic visibility, you need to collect your slow search logs. To do so, you have to follow a set of steps that break down into 3 general categories.

First, you need to define slow logs. Then, you collect the searches and parse them in a central location. Just looking at the files themselves is not enough, because they can be large and very difficult to review in JSON form. To locate slow searches, you have to look through them one by one. Lastly, you execute the steps to build a dashboard and view your collected search stats there. 

Opster’s Search Gateway automatically generates search logs, breaks them down into fields and displays them on Kibana dashboards for easy viewing. The logs retrieved describe search times from end-to-end, meaning the complete amount of time that elapsed from when the search request was entered until the results were displayed.

This number is far more accurate than the number shown in slow logs, which does not reflect how long the search actually took for users.

This enables users to not only see all of their searches, but also to derive insights from the data efficiently and address the issues that are degrading performance. 

Among those insights, users can easily find searches that are slowing down their system by answering important questions, such as, “Is the search rate increasing or staying normal?”, “Why is one search slower than the others?” and “What is slowing down a specific search and affecting the whole system?”.

To begin optimizing your searches and improving your performance, you can use Opster’s free Search Log Analyzer. With Opster’s Analyzer, you can easily locate slow searches and understand what led to them adding additional load to your system. You’ll receive customized recommendations for how to reduce search latency and improve your search performance. The tool is free and takes just 2 minutes to run.

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