Version: Search Guard 5 / This is an older version of Search Guard. Switch to Latest version

Managing the Search Guard index

Index name

If nothing else is specified, Search Guard uses searchguard as the name of the index where all configuration settings are stored.

You can configure the name of the Search Guard index. This is only necessary in special cases. If you have configured a Search Guard index name other than searchguard, you must configure this name via the -i switch.

Replica shards

If the Search Guard index is created for the first time, the number of replica shards is determined automatically and is set to the number of nodes - 1. This means that a primary or replica shard of the Search Guard index is available on all nodes.

If you add or remove nodes, you can use the -us switch to set the number of replica shards manually. Usually, you want to set this to the number of data nodes - 1. This switch does not change any configuration settings.

If you want Search Guard to manage the number of replica shards automatically, you can enable and disable the replica auto-expand feature by using the -era and -dra switches. If this is enabled, Search Guard will monitor the cluster topology, and set the number of replica shards automatically whenever a node joins or leaves the cluster.

You read more about Search Guard and replica shards in this blog post.

Note that the -us, -era and -dra only apply if there is an existing Search Guard index.