Elasticsearch¶

The Elasticsearch chart in openstack-helm-infra provides a distributed data store to index and analyze logs generated from the OpenStack-Helm services. The chart contains templates for:

Elasticsearch client nodes
Elasticsearch data nodes
Elasticsearch master nodes
An Elasticsearch exporter for providing cluster metrics to Prometheus
A cronjob for Elastic Curator to manage data indices

Authentication¶

The Elasticsearch deployment includes a sidecar container that runs an Apache reverse proxy to add authentication capabilities for Elasticsearch. The username and password are configured under the Elasticsearch entry in the endpoints section of the chart’s values.yaml.

The configuration for Apache can be found under the conf.httpd key, and uses a helm-toolkit function that allows for including gotpl entries in the template directly. This allows the use of other templates, like the endpoint lookup function templates, directly in the configuration for Apache.

Elasticsearch Service Configuration¶

The Elasticsearch service configuration file can be modified with a combination of pod environment variables and entries in the values.yaml file. Elasticsearch does not require much configuration out of the box, and the default values for these configuration settings are meant to provide a highly available cluster by default.

The vital entries in this configuration file are:

path.data: The path at which to store the indexed data
path.repo: The location of any snapshot repositories to backup indexes
bootstrap.memory_lock: Ensures none of the JVM is swapped to disk
discovery.zen.minimum_master_nodes: Minimum required masters for the cluster

The bootstrap.memory_lock entry ensures none of the JVM will be swapped to disk during execution, and setting this value to false will negatively affect the health of your Elasticsearch nodes. The discovery.zen.minimum_master_nodes flag registers the minimum number of masters required for your Elasticsearch cluster to register as healthy and functional.

To read more about Elasticsearch’s configuration file, please see the official documentation.

Elastic Curator¶

The Elasticsearch chart contains a cronjob to run Elastic Curator at specified intervals to manage the lifecycle of your indices. Curator can perform:

Take and send a snapshot of your indexes to a specified snapshot repository
Delete indexes older than a specified length of time
Restore indexes with previous index snapshots
Reindex an index into a new or preexisting index

The full list of supported Curator actions can be found in the actions section of the official Curator documentation. The list of options available for those actions can be found in the options section of the Curator documentation.

Curator’s configuration is handled via entries in Elasticsearch’s values.yaml file and must be overridden to achieve your index lifecycle management needs. Please note that any unused field should be left blank, as an entry of “None” will result in an exception, as Curator will read it as a Python NoneType insead of a value of None.

The section for Curator’s service configuration can be found at:

conf:
  curator:
    config:
      client:
        hosts:
          - elasticsearch-logging
        port: 9200
        url_prefix:
        use_ssl: False
        certificate:
        client_cert:
        client_key:
        ssl_no_validate: False
        http_auth:
        timeout: 30
        master_only: False
      logging:
        loglevel: INFO
        logfile:
        logformat: default
        blacklist: ['elasticsearch', 'urllib3']

Curator’s actions are configured in the following section:

conf:
  curator:
    action_file:
      actions:
        1:
          action: delete_indices
          description: "Clean up ES by deleting old indices"
          options:
            timeout_override:
            continue_if_exception: False
            ignore_empty_list: True
            disable_action: True
          filters:
          - filtertype: age
            source: name
            direction: older
            timestring: '%Y.%m.%d'
            unit: days
            unit_count: 30
            field:
            stats_result:
            epoch:
            exclude: False

The Elasticsearch chart contains commented example actions for deleting and snapshotting indexes older 30 days. Please note these actions are provided as a reference and are disabled by default to avoid any unexpected behavior against your indexes.

Elasticsearch Exporter¶

The Elasticsearch chart contains templates for an exporter to provide metrics for Prometheus. These metrics provide insight into the performance and overall health of your Elasticsearch cluster. Please note monitoring for Elasticsearch is disabled by default, and must be enabled with the following override:

monitoring:
  prometheus:
    enabled: true

The Elasticsearch exporter uses the same service annotations as the other exporters, and no additional configuration is required for Prometheus to target the Elasticsearch exporter for scraping. The Elasticsearch exporter is configured with command line flags, and the flags’ default values can be found under the following key in the values.yaml file:

conf:
  prometheus_elasticsearch_exporter:
    es:
      all: true
      timeout: 20s

The configuration keys configure the following behaviors:

es.all: Gather information from all nodes, not just the connecting node
es.timeout: Timeout for metrics queries

More information about the Elasticsearch exporter can be found on the exporter’s GitHub page.

Snapshot Repositories¶

Before Curator can store snapshots in a specified repository, Elasticsearch must register the configured repository. To achieve this, the Elasticsearch chart contains a job for registering an s3 snapshot repository backed by radosgateway. This job is disabled by default as the curator actions for snapshots are disabled by default. To enable the snapshot job, the conf.elasticsearch.snapshots.enabled flag must be set to true. The following configuration keys are relevant:

conf.elasticsearch.snapshots.enabled: Enable snapshot repositories
conf.elasticsearch.snapshots.bucket: Name of the RGW s3 bucket to use
conf.elasticsearch.snapshots.repositories: Name of repositories to create

More information about Elasticsearch repositories can be found in the official Elasticsearch snapshot documentation:

Elasticsearch