The Jest Elasticsearch health indicator uses a potentially heavy call to check its status

[rodol-fo]

The spring-boot-actuator Elasticsearch health check performs a call to /_all/_stats which potentially comes with a big response. In my case, this response is ~8MB at the moment and regular health checks were causing a huge load on the system. We create indices at an hourly basis. IMHO, using /_cat/health is better suited for this task

[bclozel]

I agree, the output of that command can be quite large.

It seems that the /_cat/health endpoint may not be supported in SaaS environments though; they tend to use REST gateways and limit features in shared environments, see searchly documentation for example. I've just tried with a searchly instance (ES 5.1+) and this doesn't work (I'm getting an HTTP 500).

Do you know of other potential endpoints that we could use?

[rodol-fo]

In the case of Searchly, all administrative features of ElasticSearch are restricted from the API, according to their documentation. That doesn't leave us with a lot of room, does it? I'm sure that Searchly have their reasons to do so, but that is one case out of millions of users, and many of them are not developing in shared environments with special restrictions.

I still believe that the right endpoint to call by default should be /_cat/health which could be overridden via configuration properties.

Instead of having management.health.elasticsearch.indices= we could have management.health.elasticsearch.endpoint=/_cat/health

[philwebb]

I think we should treat this one as a bug so I've targeted it to 1.5.4. We've only got a few days before that release so we might not get to it in time. It still feels like a solution in 1.5.x would be useful.

[bclozel]

Note: it's not a case of Searchly vs. rest of the world. It's more a case of ElasticSearch instances running on premise vs. in the cloud (the official elastic.co cloud offering or the AWS one). Even companies running their own cluster can have X-Pack enabled and disable cluster info access from applications.