Each week, a new “Do You Know” will be posted on our Elastic Technical Knowledge Hub to share useful knowledge to improve the observability using Elasticsearch. These topics originate from day-to-day challenges we solved for our clients. A stepwise description helps you to successfully implement solutions on improving the performance of your deployment and get the best monitoring of your applications using dashboards and alerting.
This week I will discuss: how to solve a mapping conflict in your Elasticsearch index.
Background
When a new document is indexed, Elasticsearch automatically infers the data types of the fields based on the first document received. If subsequent documents contain the same field but with a different data type, Elasticsearch will generate a mapping exception. To resolve this issue, a mapping of the field must be applied, and subsequently re-indexing your data will remove the mapping conflict.
Solution
Step 1
In Kibana, go to the menu and choose Stack Management → Data View. Check your data view on mapping conflicts. When a mapping conflict occurs, you can retrieve the index name and the conflicting field type by clicking on the conflicting field type.
Step 2
Create your mapping by updating your index template.
In Kibana go to: Stack Management → Index Management → Index Template.
Search for your index template and choose Edit. At Tab 4: Mappings, choose Add field. Map the Field Name and Field Type. Save the template and perform an index rollover:
POST <index name>/_rolloverIn case you do not have an index template, just perform the following query in the Dev Tool in Kibana:
PUT /my_index
{
"mappings": {
"properties": {
"<field name>": {
"type": "<choose your type, like text or object>"
}
}
}
}
Step 3
Perform a re-index of your data that contains a mapping conflict.
POST _reindex
{
"source": {
"index": "source"
},
"dest": {
"index": "dest",
}
}
Step 4
After the re-indexing took place, go to Kibana to Stack Management → Index Management → Indices and remove the source index. Your mapping conflict does not longer exist.
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