While Watcher is active, it often accesses different indices in Elasticsearch. These can be internal indices used for its ongoing operation (such as the .watches index where all the watches are stored) or as part of a watch execution via the search input, search transform or the index actions.

To to ensure that Watcher’s workflow doesn’t hang on long running search or indexing operations, these operations time out after a set period of time. You can change the default timeouts in elasticsearch.yml. The timeouts you can configure are shown in the following table.