Version: 7.x-47.0.0
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Conditions

Conditions are used to control the execution flow. A condition can be used anywhere in the execution chain for watches and actions.

A condition is a script - usually written in Painless - that has access to the complete execution runtime data and returns a boolean value. If the condition returns true, the execution continues. If the condition returns false, the execution is stopped.

In watches, a condition controls whether a certain value or threshold is reached, to decide whether the watch should continue execution.

In actions, conditions can be used to control if a certain action should be executed. For example, you can decide to send an email to an administrator if the error level in your log files is too high. In addition, if the error level stays high for a certain amount of time, you can send another email, escalating the issue to another person.

The following condition tests whether the total hits of a search, stored in the execution context under the name mysearch, is higher than zero:

{
  "type": "condition",
  "name": "mycondition",
  "source": "data.mysearch.hits.hits.length > 0"
}
Name Description
type condition, defines this check as condition. Mandatory.
name name of this condition. Can be chosen freely. Mandatory.
source The script to execute. Mandatory
lang The scripting language to be used. Optional, defaults to painless. Other scripting languages may be provided by Elasticsearch plugins.

Accessing the runtime data

All scripts have full access to the runtime data, gathered for example by Elasticsearch or HTTP inputs.

The runtime data is available via the data prefix.

For example, the following watch runs a query against the server logs index to find entries where the status code is 500. The target property of the input is configured to be http_error_500; thus the document read by the input is put under this property name into the runtime data. The script condition accesses the data by using the data.http_error_500 prefix and only continues if the total hits is above 10.

{
  "trigger":{},
  "checks":[
    {
        "type":"search",
        "name":"server_errors",
        "target":"http_error_500",
        "request":{
            "indices":[ "serverlogs" ],
            "body":{
               "query" : { "match" : { "statuscode" : "500" } }
            }
        }
    },
    {
        "type": "condition",
        "name": "error_500_threshold",
        "source": "return data.http_error_500.hits.total.value > 10"
    }
  ],
  "actions":[ ... ]
}

Using conditions with actions

A condition can also be used to control the execution of an action. Each action can define its own chain of checks, including conditions.

Continuing on the example above, the following snippet will send an email to the administrator if the watch fires.

A second action will send an additional email to a manager if the total number of hits is above 100. This is controlled by the script condition in the action definition:

{
  "trigger":{},
  "checks":[],
  "actions":[
    {
         "type":"email",
         "name":"standard_admin",
         "account":"it_smtp",
         "to": ["[email protected]"],
         "subject": "Too many errors detected.",
         "text_body":"Found more than {{data.http_error_500.hits.total.value}} hits."
    },
    {
         "type":"email",
         "name":"standard_admin",
         "account":"it_smtp",
         "to": ["[email protected]"],
         "subject": "Warning: Critical amount of errors found",
         "text_body":"Found more than {{data.http_error_500.hits.total.value}} hits.",
         "checks": [
           {
               "type": "condition",
               "name": "escalation_level_1",
               "source": "return data.http_error_500.hits.total.value > 100"
           }
         ]
    }    
  ]
}


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