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Usually, the results from various Elasticsearch Cat APIs are displayed in JSON format. But JSON is not easy to read always. So cat APIs feature is available in Elasticsearch helps in taking care of giving an easier to read and comprehend printing format of the results. There are various parameters used in cat API which serve a different purpose, for example – the term V makes the output verbose.

Let us learn about Elasticsearch cat APIs more in detail in this chapter.

Verbose

The verbose output gives a nice display of the results of the cat command. In the example given below, we get the details of various indices present in the cluster.

GET /_cat/indices?v

On running the above code, we get the response as shown below −

health status index uuid pri rep docs.count docs.deleted store.size pri.store.size
yellow open schools RkMyEn2SQ4yUgzT6EQYuAA 1 1 2 1 21.6kb 21.6kb
yellow open index_4_analysis zVmZdM1sTV61YJYrNXf1gg 1 1 0 0 283b 283b
yellow open sensor-2018-01-01 KIrrHwABRB-ilGqTu3OaVQ 1 1 1 0 4.2kb 4.2kb
yellow open colleges 3ExJbdl2R1qDLssIkwDAug 1 1 0 0 283b 283b

Headers

The h parameter, also called header, is used to display only those columns mentioned in the command.

GET /_cat/nodes?h=ip,port

On running the above code, we get the response as shown below −

127.0.0.1 9300

Sort

The sort command accepts query string which can sort the table by specified column in the query. The default sort is ascending but this can be changed by adding:desc to a column.

The below example gives a result of templates arranged in descending order of the filed index patterns.

GET _cat/templates?v&s=order:desc,index_patterns

On running the above code, we get the response as shown below −

name index_patterns order version
.triggered_watches [.triggered_watches*] 2147483647
.watch-history-9 [.watcher-history-9*] 2147483647
.watches [.watches*] 2147483647
.kibana_task_manager [.kibana_task_manager] 0 7000099

Count

The count parameter provides the count of the total number of documents in the entire cluster.

GET /_cat/count?v

On running the above code, we get the response as shown below −

epoch timestamp count
1557633536 03:58:56 17809

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