Elasticsearch OpenSearch Coordinating & Ingest Node

By Opster Team

Updated: Apr 11, 2023

| 1 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.

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.

Easily set up your OpenSearch node roles with the free Opster Management Console (OMC). The OMC makes it easy to orchestrate and manage OpenSearch in any K8 environment. Using the OMC you can deploy multiple clusters, configure node roles, scale cluster resources, manage certificates and more – all from a single interface, for free.

Overview

Coordinating nodes differ to ingest nodes. Many clusters do not use dedicated coordinating or ingest nodes, and leave the ingest and coordination functions to the data nodes.

Coordinating Node

A coordinating node is a node which has:

node.master: false 
node.data: false 
node.ingest: false

This means that the only functions it can carry out are those related to relaying queries to other data nodes, acting as a load balancer. This configuration is only recommended for large clusters (usually 20 nodes or more).

If you have coordinating nodes, then search requests should be load-balanced across the coordinating nodes rather than sending directly to the data nodes.

Ingest Node

Not to be confused with coordinating nodes, an ingest node is a specific type of node used for pre-processing documents in ingest pipelines.  If you intensively use ingest pipelines for processing documents (eg. log parsing or pdf document processing) then it may make sense to use this type of node on medium to large clusters (10 nodes or more).

An ingest node is created by setting:

node.master: false 
node.data: false 
node.ingest: true

All indexing requests that require ingest pipelines should be load balanced across the ingest nodes. Search requests must not be sent to ingest nodes where node.data is false.

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