Elasticsearch Discovery

By Opster Team

Updated: Jan 28, 2024

| 2 min read

Overview

The process known as discovery occurs when an Elasticsearch node starts, restarts or loses contact with the master node for any reason. In those cases, the node needs to contact other nodes in the cluster to find any existing master node or initiate the election of a new master node. 

How it works

Upon startup, each node looks for other nodes, firstly by contacting the IP addresses of eligible master nodes held in the previous cluster state.  If they are not available, it will look for nodes based upon the seed host provider mechanisms available.

Seed host providers may be defined in 3 ways: list based, file based or plugin based. All of these methods provide a list of IP addresses or hostnames which the node should contact in order to obtain a list of master eligible nodes. The node will contact all of these addresses in turn, until either an active master is found, or failing that, until sufficient nodes can be found to elect a new master node.

Examples

The simplest form is to define a list of seed host providers in elasticsearch.yml:

discovery.seed_hosts:
   - 192.168.1.10:9300
   - 192.168.1.11 
   - seeds.mydomain.com

An alternative way is to refer to a file using the following setting:

discovery.seed_providers: file

The file MUST be placed in the following filepath: $ES_PATH_CONF/unicast_hosts.txt

10.10.10.5
10.10.10.6:9305
10.10.10.5:10005
# an IPv6 address
[2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334]:9301

Note that the use of a port is optional. If not used, then the default port range of 9300-9400 will be used.

If you use AWS or GCS then you can install and use a plugin to obtain a list of seed hosts from an API.  A plugin also exists for Azure but is deprecated since version 5.

AWS plugin

A typical configuration could be as follows:

discovery.seed_providers: ec2
discovery.ec2.tag.role: master
discovery.ec2.tag.environment: dev
discovery.ec2.endpoint: ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
cloud.node.auto_attributes: true
cluster.routing.allocation.awareness.attributes: aws_availability_zone

The above configuration would look for all nodes with a tag called “environment” set to “dev” and a tag called “role” set to “master”, in the AWS zone us-east-1. The last two lines set up cluster routing allocation awareness based upon aws availability zones. (Not necessary, but nice to have).

GCE plugin

A typical configuration could be as follows:

discovery.seed_providers: gce
cloud.gce.project_id: <your-google-project-id>
cloud.gce.zone: <your-zone>
discovery.gce.tags: <my-tag-name>

The above configuration would look for all virtual machines inside your project, zone and with a tag set to the tag name you provide.

Notes and good things to know

Cluster formation depends on correct setup of the network.host settings in elasticsearch.yml.  Make sure that the nodes can reach each other across the network using their IP addresses / hostname, and are not getting blocked due to firewall settings on the ports required.

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Related log errors to this ES concept


No network address found ignoring
Can not convert to transport address skipping
Error while closing Azure client
Exception caught during discovery
Unable to shutdown GCE Http Transport
Problem fetching instance list for zone
Disabling GCE discovery Can not get list of nodes
Unable to resolve project from metadata server for GCE discovery service
Unable to resolve default zone from metadata server for GCE discovery service
Starting GCE discovery service
Unable to start GCE discovery service
Failed to get metadata for placement availability-zone

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