Before you begin reading this guide, we recommend you try running the Elasticsearch Error Check-Up which can resolve issues that cause many errors.
This guide will help you check for common problems that cause the log ” missing explanation value ” to appear. It’s important to understand the issues related to the log, so to get started, read the general overview on common issues and tips related to the Elasticsearch concepts: search.
Advanced users might want to skip right to the common problems section in each concept or try running the Check-Up which analyses ES to pinpoint the cause of many errors and provides suitable actionable recommendations how to resolve them (free tool that requires no installation).
Overview
Search refers to the searching of documents in an index or multiple indices. The simple search is just a GET API request to the _search endpoint. The search query can either be provided in query string or through a request body.
Examples
When looking for any documents in this index, if search parameters are not provided, every document is a hit and by default 10 hits will be returned.
GET my_documents/_search
A JSON object is returned in response to a search query. A 200 response code means the request was completed successfully.
{
"took" : 1,
"timed_out" : false,
"_shards" : {
"total" : 2,
"successful" : 2,
"failed" : 0
},
"hits" : {
"total" : 2,
"max_score" : 1.0,
"hits" : [
...
]
}
}Notes and good things to know
- Distributed search is challenging and every shard of the index needs to be searched for hits, and then those hits are combined into a single sorted list as a final result.
- There are two phases of search: the query phase and the fetch phase.
- In the query phase, the query is executed on each shard locally and top hits are returned to the coordinating node. The coordinating node merges the results and creates a global sorted list.
- In the fetch phase, the coordinating node brings the actual documents for those hit IDs and returns them to the requesting client.
- A coordinating node needs enough memory and CPU in order to handle the fetch phase.
Log Context
Log”missing explanation value”classname is SearchHit.java We extracted the following from Elasticsearch source code for those seeking an in-depth context :
} else {
parser.skipChildren();
}
}
if (value == null) {
throw new ParsingException(parser.getTokenLocation(); "missing explanation value");
}
if (description == null) {
throw new ParsingException(parser.getTokenLocation(); "missing explanation description");
}
return Explanation.match(value; description; details);Run the Check-Up to get customized recommendations like this:
Run Check-Up
Heavy merges detected in specific nodes
Description
A large number of small shards can slow down searches and cause cluster instability. Some indices have shards that are too small…
Recommendations Based on your specific ES deployment you should…
Based on your specific ES deployment you should…
X-PUT curl -H [a customized recommendation]