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Elastic Docs ›Elasticsearch Guide [5.3] ›cat APIs

cat shards

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IMPORTANT: This documentation is no longer updated. Refer to Elastic's version policy and the latest documentation.

cat shards

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The shards command is the detailed view of what nodes contain which shards. It will tell you if it’s a primary or replica, the number of docs, the bytes it takes on disk, and the node where it’s located.

Here we see a single index, with one primary shard and no replicas:

GET _cat/shards
Copy as curlTry in Elastic 

This will return

twitter 0 p STARTED 3014 31.1mb 192.168.56.10 H5dfFeA
twitter 0 r UNASSIGNED

Index pattern

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If you have many shards, you may wish to limit which indices show up in the output. You can always do this with grep, but you can save some bandwidth by supplying an index pattern to the end.

GET _cat/shards/twitt*
Copy as curlTry in Elastic 

Which will return the following

twitter 0 p STARTED 3014 31.1mb 192.168.56.10 H5dfFeA
twitter 0 r UNASSIGNED

Relocation

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Let’s say you’ve checked your health and you see a relocating shards. Where are they from and where are they going?

GET _cat/shards
Copy as curlTry in Elastic 

A relocating shard will be shown as follows

twitter 0 p RELOCATING 3014 31.1mb 192.168.56.10 H5dfFeA -> -> 192.168.56.30 bGG90GE

Shard states

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Before a shard can be used, it goes through an INITIALIZING state. shards can show you which ones.

GET _cat/shards
Copy as curlTry in Elastic 

You can the the initializing state in the response like this

twitter 0 p STARTED      3014 31.1mb 192.168.56.10 H5dfFeA
twitter 0 r INITIALIZING    0 14.3mb 192.168.56.30 bGG90GE

If a shard cannot be assigned, for example you’ve overallocated the number of replicas for the number of nodes in the cluster, the shard will remain UNASSIGNED with the reason code ALLOCATION_FAILED.

You can use the shards API to find out that reason.

GET _cat/shards?h=index,shard,prirep,state,unassigned.reason
Copy as curlTry in Elastic 

The reason for an unassigned shard will be listed as the last field

twitter 0 p STARTED    3014 31.1mb 192.168.56.10 H5dfFeA
twitter 0 r STARTED    3014 31.1mb 192.168.56.30 bGG90GE
twitter 0 r STARTED    3014 31.1mb 192.168.56.20 I8hydUG
twitter 0 r UNASSIGNED ALLOCATION_FAILED

Reasons for unassigned shard

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These are the possible reasons for a shard to be in a unassigned state:

INDEX_CREATED

Unassigned as a result of an API creation of an index.

CLUSTER_RECOVERED

Unassigned as a result of a full cluster recovery.

INDEX_REOPENED

Unassigned as a result of opening a closed index.

DANGLING_INDEX_IMPORTED

Unassigned as a result of importing a dangling index.

NEW_INDEX_RESTORED

Unassigned as a result of restoring into a new index.

EXISTING_INDEX_RESTORED

Unassigned as a result of restoring into a closed index.

REPLICA_ADDED

Unassigned as a result of explicit addition of a replica.

ALLOCATION_FAILED

Unassigned as a result of a failed allocation of the shard.

NODE_LEFT

Unassigned as a result of the node hosting it leaving the cluster.

REROUTE_CANCELLED

Unassigned as a result of explicit cancel reroute command.

REINITIALIZED

When a shard moves from started back to initializing, for example, with shadow replicas.

REALLOCATED_REPLICA

A better replica location is identified and causes the existing replica allocation to be cancelled.

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