The majority of this book is aimed at building applications by using Elasticsearch as the backend. This section is a little different. Here, you will learn how to manage Elasticsearch itself. Elasticsearch is a complex piece of software, with many moving parts. Many APIs are designed to help you manage your Elasticsearch deployment.

In this chapter, we cover three main topics:

• Monitoring your cluster’s vital statistics, understanding which behaviors are normal and which should be cause for alarm, and interpreting various stats provided by Elasticsearch

• Deploying your cluster to production, including best practices and important configuration that should (or should not!) be changed

• Performing post-deployment logistics, such as a rolling restart or backup of your cluster