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Ways To Crash Elasticsearch

Roi Ravhon shows how to take down an Elasticsearch instance:

Cardinality aggregation is used to count distinct values in a data set. For example, if you want to know the number of IPs used in your system, you can use this aggregation on an IP field and then count the results.

Despite the usefulness, cardinality can also be a touchy Elasticsearch feature to use. Performing a unique count on a field with a multitude of possible values when configuring a visualization, for example, can bring Elasticsearch to a halt.

Most of it comes down to writing good queries.  But if you don’t know what good Elasticsearch queries look like, read on.