Elasticsearch OpenSearch Template

By Opster Team

Updated: Mar 29, 2023

| 2 min read

In addition to reading this guide, we recommend you run the Elasticsearch Health Check-Up. It will detect issues and improve your Elasticsearch performance by analyzing your shard sizes, threadpools, memory, snapshots, disk watermarks and more.

The Elasticsearch Check-Up is free and requires no installation.

In addition to reading this guide and learning how to create search and dynamic index templates, we recommend you run the Template Optimizer. It will help you optimize your templates to improve your cluster’s configuration and performance.

To easily resolve issues in your deployment and locate their root cause, try AutoOps for OpenSearch. It diagnoses problems by analyzing hundreds of metrics collected by a lightweight agent and offers guidance for resolving them.

Quick links

Overview

A template in OpenSearch falls into one of the two following categories and is indexed inside OpenSearch using its dedicated endpoint: 

  1. Index templates, which are a way to define a set of rules including index settings, mappings and an index pattern. The template is applied automatically whenever a new index is created with the matching pattern. Templates are also used to dynamically apply custom mapping for the fields which are not predefined inside existing mapping.
  2. Search templates, which help in defining templates for search queries using mustache scripting language. These templates act as a placeholder for variables defined inside the search queries.

Examples

Create a dynamic index template

PUT /_template/template_1?pretty
{
  "index_patterns": [
    "logs*",
    "api*"
  ],
  "settings": {
    "number_of_shards": 2
  },
  "mappings": {
    "dynamic_templates": [
      {
        "strings": {
          "match_mapping_type": "string",
          "mapping": {
            "type": "keyword"
          }
        }
      }
    ],
    "properties": {
      "host_name": {
        "type": "keyword"
      },
      "created_at": {
        "type": "date"
      }
    }
  }
}

Create a search template

POST /_scripts/search_template_1?pretty
{
    "script": {
        "lang": "mustache",
        "source": {
            "query": {
                "match": {
                    "description": "{{query_string}}"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Executing a search query using search template

GET /_search/template?pretty
{
    "id": "search_template_1", 
    "params": {
        "query_string": "hello world"
    }
}

The search request will be executed by default on all the indices available in the cluster and can be limited to particular indices using an index parameter.

Notes

  • A dynamic index template is always useful when you do not know the field names in advance and want to control their mapping as per the business use case.

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