Triggering elasticsearch ilm step manually

Elasticsearch provides an index lifecycle management that will handle traversal of indices through a whole bunch of lifecycle steps. Sometimes you might want to give the ILM a small tap and move to a specific step manually. This guide will explain how this can be done.

These steps are separated into four major phases:

• hot
• warm
• cold
• delete

The phases and steps are documented here: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/master/ilm-index-lifecycle.html

Depending on the age of an index a traversal through theses phases is executed and the configuration of an index is altered.

Most important use case is to adjust the resiliency for an index, possibly the storage location and set the state to reduce the amount of memory footprint associated with an index.

This article focues on the situation when the ILM doesn't advance the state of the index. In general this is not an issue of elasticearch - propably related to configuration.

Let's say we're in hot state and our index doesn't rollover or is faulted in rollover preparation. How can we trigger the index to move to warm phase?

POST _ilm/move/myindex
{
  "current_step": {
    "phase": "hot",
    "action": "rollover",
    "name": "check-rollover-ready"
  },
  "next_step": { 
    "phase": "warm",
    "action": "set_priority",
    "name": "set_priority"
  }
}

This request will effectively tell elasticsearch to move from the current state check-rollover-state in hot phase to warm phase at step set_priority (which is the first available state in warm phase).

After all, the index will be moved to the desired state (i would not recommend to skip steps unless it's explicitly intended).