Migrating from Watcheredit

Prior to 5.0 all watcher specific settings were prefixed with watcher. Those have been changed to start with xpack.watcher now, For example watcher.execution.default_throttle_period becomes xpack.watcher.execution.default_throttle_period.

The setting to allow scripting only for watcher has been renamed from script.engine.groovy.inline.elasticsearch-watcher_watch to script.engine.groovy.inline.xpack_watch.

All account specific SMTP timeouts (smtp.timeout, smtp.connection_timeout and smtp.write_timeout) now require a time value instead of a number, that represented milliseconds in earlier releases.

Watcher history now uses a versioned template. The index names also changed and contain this version. So instead of .watch_history_2016.02.03 the new index name is .watcher-history-1-2016.02.03, 1 being the current version. If are also migrating from Shield (to X-Pack security).

this might require you to change roles/permissions because of the different index names!

The old index template named watch_history can be deleted now. It will not interfere with the newly added index template though.

The notification settings for pagerduty, slack, hipchat and email have been moved and renamed. The move happened from xpack.watcher.actions to xpack.notification. For example the slack configuration needs to move from xpack.watcher.actions.slack.service to xpack.notification.slack. The service part has been removed for all notification settings.

All watcher endpoints have been renamed from /_watcher/XYZ to /_xpack/watcher/XYZ. You might need to fix this in your clients, monitoring scripts, potential HTTP proxies/redirectors as well as in your watches.

Watcher and scriptsedit

The default scripting language in Elasticsearch has been changed to be painless. This applies for Watcher too, so when new scripts or updating existing scripts and no script language has been explicitly specified then the painless language will be used.

If in your watches you have scripts that don’t set the scripting language specifically then upon upgrading watcher will set the language explicitly. By default the language will be set to groovy. If you your default language for scripts is different than groovy then set the script.legacy.default_lang setting before upgrading to what your default language is now. This is important otherwise watches may not work after the upgrade and you need to update all your watches manually.