Open Distro for Elasticsearch‘s Performance Analyzer plugin exposes a REST API that returns metrics from your Elasticsearch cluster. To get the most out of these metrics, you can store them in Elasticsearch and use Kibana to visualize them. While you can use Open Distro for Elasticsearch’s PerfTop to build visualizations, PerfTop doesn’t retain data and is meant to be lightweight.
In this post, I’ll explore Performance Analyzer’s API through a code sample that reads Performance Analyzer’s metrics and writes them to Elasticsearch. You might wonder why Performance Analyzer doesn’t do that already (we welcome your pull requests!). Performance Analyzer is designed as a lightweight co-process for Elasticsearch that decouples Elasticsearch monitoring from Elasticsearch failures. If your Elasticsearch cluster is in trouble, it might not be able to respond to requests, and Kibana might be down. If you adopt the sample code, I recommend that you send the data to a different Open Distro for Elasticsearch cluster to avoid this issue.
You can follow along with the sample code I published in our GitHub Community repository. The code is in the pa-to-es folder when you clone the repository. You can find information about the other code samples in past blog posts.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/blog/open%20distro%20for%20elasticsearch%20updates/2019/05/Store-Open-Distro-for-Elasticsearch-s-Performance-Analyzer-Output-in-Elasticsearch/