WATCHLOG INTEGRATION
ES

Monitor Elasticsearch.

Cluster health, unassigned shards, JVM heap and GC pressure, search and indexing performance, thread pool rejections, and circuit breaker trips. Point the agent at one node — it discovers the rest of the cluster.

One endpoint, whole cluster·Elasticsearch 7.x, 8.x & 9.x·Read-only
WHAT WATCHLOG COLLECTS

Complete Elasticsearch observability.

The Watchlog Agent needs one reachable endpoint. Every node, index, shard and thread pool is discovered from the cluster itself.

_cluster/health.statusCluster Health

Green, yellow or red — scored with context, not as a raw threshold

unassigned_primary_shardsUnassigned Primary Shards

The shards whose absence means data is genuinely unavailable

jvm.mem.heap_used_percentJVM Heap Usage

Per node, judged on sustained pressure rather than a single spike

jvm.gc.collectors.old.collection_time_in_millisGC Pause Time

Old-generation pauses as a share of wall-clock time

indices.search.query_totalSearch Rate

Queries per second across the cluster and per index

query_time_in_millis / query_totalQuery Latency

Mean query and fetch time over the interval, never the lifetime average

indices.indexing.index_totalIndexing Rate

Documents indexed per second, counted per primary shard

indices.indexing.index_failedIndexing Failures

Operations Elasticsearch rejected, usually a mapping conflict

thread_pool.search.rejectedThread Pool Rejections

Every rejection is a request the cluster dropped rather than served

breakers.parent.trippedCircuit Breaker Trips

Requests refused to protect the heap — an event, not a warning sign

fs.total.available_in_bytesDisk vs. Watermark

Measured against your configured low, high and flood-stage watermarks

indices.merges.total_throttled_time_in_millisMerge Throttling

When merges fall behind writes, indexing latency follows

LIVE DASHBOARD

Your cluster at a glance.

Seven tabs — Overview, Performance, Nodes, Indices, Shards, Slow Operations and Diagnostics — activate the moment you enable the integration.

● Elasticsearch Dashboard Live
Cluster StatusGreen
JVM Heap62%
Search Rate1.4k/s
Unassigned Shards0
Query Latency18 ms
Disk Usage71%

Watchlog scores cluster health with context, not thresholds. A cluster with one data node cannot allocate a replica anywhere, so yellow is its correct steady state — Watchlog says so instead of paging you. Disk is judged against your own configured watermarks, not a hardcoded 85%.

USE CASES

What engineers use Elasticsearch monitoring for.

Unassigned shard triage

See every unassigned shard with Elasticsearch's own reason, and a cached allocation explanation translated into one plain sentence — "all eligible nodes exceed the configured disk watermark" rather than a decision tree.

Heap pressure and GC

Track heap per node alongside garbage collection time as a share of wall clock. Two hundred collections costing 2 ms each is healthy; four costing 900 ms each is not, and only one of those is visible in a count.

Search latency regression

Find which index regressed, not just that the cluster got slower. Per-index query and fetch latency, ranked, with slow searches from the Elasticsearch slow log when you have one configured.

Capacity and watermark planning

Watch disk against the watermarks your cluster actually uses, with alerts before the high watermark starts relocating shards under load and long before flood stage makes indices read-only.

WHY WATCHLOG

Signals that mean something.

Elasticsearch produces thousands of numbers. Watchlog turns them into the handful that predict an incident — and explains each one in a sentence.

  • Know whether yellow means "one data node" or "a primary shard is missing" — Watchlog distinguishes them
  • Catch thread pool rejections, which are dropped user requests, not just a busy moment
  • See circuit breaker trips as the events they are, separately from elevated utilisation
  • Compare nodes against the cluster median, so one pathological node cannot hide inside an average
  • Track index growth and project it against free disk before ILM becomes urgent
  • Get every deduction in the health score explained in a sentence, with a recommendation attached
READ-ONLY BY DESIGN

Watchlog never touches your cluster.

The integration issues read requests only, and that is enforced in code rather than by convention — there is no path through which it can express a mutation.

NEVER EXECUTED
  • DELETE or PUT of any index
  • _cluster/reroute
  • Cancelling a running task
  • Closing or opening an index
  • _forcemerge, _flush or cache clears
  • Updating cluster or index settings
  • Enabling slow logs on your behalf
  • Changing replica counts or watermarks
WHAT IT DOES INSTEAD
  • Reads cluster health, node, index and shard stats
  • Explains why a shard cannot be allocated
  • Tells you which command would fix it
  • Scrubs query text on your host before it leaves
  • Withholds document bodies by default
  • Degrades one section when a privilege is missing
  • Skips _cluster/state entirely on large clusters
  • Runs hot threads only when you press the button

Minimum privileges: the monitor cluster privilege and monitor on the indices you want covered. Administrator access is never required — and if one API is unreadable, only that section is disabled while everything else keeps working.

QUICK SETUP

Elasticsearch monitoring in under 2 minutes.

One endpoint and a monitoring user. No per-node configuration, no sidecar on every pod.

01

Install the Watchlog Agent

Deploy the agent on any host that can reach your cluster. It does not have to be an Elasticsearch node.

02

Add one endpoint

Host, port and a monitoring user — or an API key. The agent discovers every other node from there.

03

Dashboard populates in 60s

Cluster health, nodes and shards appear within a minute; index detail on the next collection cycle.

INSTALL WATCHLOG AGENT
sudo apiKey="$WATCHLOG_API_KEY" server="$WATCHLOG_SERVER" MEMORY="300M" bash -c "$(curl -L https://watchlog.io/ubuntu/watchlog-script.sh)

The agent detects Elasticsearch on port 9200 during its discovery scan. Add a monitoring user and the whole cluster appears — nodes, indices and shards included.

GET STARTED

Start monitoring Elasticsearch now.

Full cluster visibility in under 2 minutes. No credit card required.

Questions? Contact us at [email protected]