Index operations reference

The following operations are available from the Manage index menu on the Index Management page in Kibana. Select one or more indices and open the menu to access these actions. Some operations are unavailable in Elastic Cloud Serverless because data management tasks are handled automatically.

Available index operations

The following operations are available from the Manage index menu. Some operations are unavailable in Elastic Cloud Serverless because data management tasks are handled automatically.

Show index overview: View an overview of the index, including its storage size, status, and aliases, as well as a sample API request to add new documents.
Show index settings: View a list of the currently configured index settings. Turn on Edit mode to add or change settings.
Show index mapping: View the index mappings. From this page you can set up new mappings for the field types in your index.
Show index stats: View statistics for your index. Statistics are compiled by primaries, representing values only for primary shards, and by total, representing accumulated values for both primary and replica shards. Refer to the get index statistics API for details.
Close index: Close the index so that read or write operations cannot be performed. Refer to the close index API for details.
Open index: Reopen an index that is currently closed to read and write operations. This option is available only for indices that are currently closed. Refer to the open index API for details.
Force merge index: Reduce the number of segments in each shard by merging some of them together and free up the space used by deleted documents. Refer to the force merge API for details.
Refresh index: Refresh the index to make recent operations available for search. Refer to the refresh index API for details.
Clear index cache: Clear all caches for the index. Refer to the clear cache API for details.
Flush index: Flush the index to permanently write all data currently in the transaction log to the Lucene index. Refer to the flush index API for details.
Delete index: Delete an index including all of its documents, shards, and metadata. Refer to the delete index API for details.
Add lifecycle policy: Add a lifecycle policy to manage how the index transitions over time. The policy governs how the index moves through phases (hot, warm, cold, frozen, and delete) and what actions are performed during each phase (for example, shrinking and downsampling). Refer to Index lifecycle management for details.
Convert to lookup index: Convert the index to a lookup mode index that can be used with LOOKUP JOIN commands, so that data from the index can be added to ES|QL query results. This option is available only for single shard indices with fewer than two billion documents. Refer to the Elasticsearch index.mode index setting for details.