Observability is a critical step for digital transformation and cloud journeys. Any enterprise building applications and delivering them to customers is on the hook to keep those applications running smoothly to ensure seamless digital experiences. To gain visibility into a system’s health and performance, there is no real alternative to observability. The stakes are high for getting observability right — poor digital experiences can damage reputations and prevent revenue generation.

Elasticsearch (ES) is a powerful tool offering multiple search, content, and analytics capabilities. You can extend its capacity and relatively quickly horizontally scale the cluster by adding more nodes. When data is indexed in some Elasticsearch index, the index is not typically placed in one node but is spread across different nodes such that each node contains a “shard” of the index data. The shard (called primary shard) is replicated across the cluster into several replicas.

Disk-related issues with Elasticsearch can present themselves through various symptoms. It is important to understand their root causes and know how to deal with them when they arise. As an Elasticsearch cluster administrator, you are likely to encounter some of the following cluster symptoms.

If you’re in the cloud engineering and DevOps space, you’ve probably seen the name OpenSearch a lot over the last couple of years. But, what is your current understanding of OpenSearch, and the components around it? Let’s take a closer look.