Upgrade Assistantedit

The Upgrade Assistant helps you prepare for your upgrade to the next major Elasticsearch version. For example, if you are using 6.8, the Upgrade Assistant helps you to upgrade to 7.0. To access the assistant, open the menu, then go to Stack Management > Elasticsearch > Upgrade Assistant.

The assistant identifies the deprecated settings in your cluster and indices and guides you through the process of resolving issues, including reindexing.

Before you upgrade, make sure that you are using the latest released minor version of Elasticsearch to see the most up-to-date deprecation issues. For example, if you want to upgrade to to 7.0, make sure that you are using 6.8.

Reindexingedit

The Indices page lists the indices that are incompatible with the next major version of Elasticsearch. You can initiate a reindex to resolve the issues.

management upgrade assistant 8.0

For a preview of how the data will change during the reindex, select the index name. A warning appears if the index requires destructive changes. Back up your index, then proceed with the reindex by accepting each breaking change.

You can follow the progress as the Upgrade Assistant makes the index read-only, creates a new index, reindexes the documents, and creates an alias that points from the old index to the new one.

If the reindexing fails or is cancelled, the changes are rolled back, the new index is deleted, and the original index becomes writable. An error message explains the reason for the failure.

You can reindex multiple indices at a time, but keep an eye on the Elasticsearch metrics, including CPU usage, memory pressure, and disk usage. If a metric is so high it affects query performance, cancel the reindex and continue by reindexing fewer indices at a time.

Additional considerations:

  • If you use alerting features, when you reindex the internal indices (.watches), the Watcher process pauses and no alerts are triggered.
  • If you use machine learning features, when you reindex the internal indices (.ml-state), the machine learning jobs pause and models are not trained or updated.
  • If you use security features, before you reindex the internal indices (.security*), it is a good idea to create a temporary superuser account in the file realm. For more information, see Configuring a file realm.