Connecting NiFi to ElasticSearch

Question

I'm trying to solve one task and will appreciate any help - links to documentation, or links to forums, or other FAQs besides https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NIFI/FAQs, or any meaningful answer in this post =) .

So, I have the following task: Initial part of my system collects data each 5-15 min from different DB sources. Then I remove duplicates, remove junk, combine data from different sources according to logic and then redirect it to second part of the system as several streams. As far as I know, "NiFi" can do this task in the best way =).

Currently I can successfully get information from InfluxDB by "GetHTTP" processor. However I can't configure same kind of processor for getting information from Elastic DB with all necessary options. I'd like to receive data each 5-15 minutes for time period from "now-minus-<5-15 minutes>" to "now". (depends on scheduler period) with several additional filters. If I understand it right, this can be achieved either by subscription to "_index" or by regular requests to DB with desired interval.

I know that NiFi has several specific Processors designed for Elasticsearch (FetchElasticsearch5, FetchElasticsearchHttp, QueryElasticsearchHttp, ScrollElasticsearchHttp) as well as GetHTTP and PostHTTP Processors. However, unfortunately, I have lack of information or even better - examples - how to configure their "Properties" for my purposes =(.

What's the difference between FetchElasticsearchHttp, QueryElasticsearchHttp? Which one fits better for my task? What's the difference between GetHTTP and QueryElasticsearchHttp besides several specific fields? Will GetHTTP perform the same way if I tune it as I need?

Any advice?

I will be grateful for any help.

Answer 1

The ElasticsearchHttp processors try to make it easier to interact with ES by generating the appropriate REST API call based on the properties you set. If you know the full URL you need, you could use GetHttp or InvokeHttp. However the ESHttp processors let you put in just the stuff you're looking for, and it will generate the URL and return the results.

FetchElasticsearch (and its variants) is used to get a particular document when you know the identifier. This is sometimes used after a search/query, to return documents one at a time after you know which ones you want.

QueryElasticsearchHttp is for when you want to do a Lucene-style query of the documents, when you don't necessarily know which documents you want. It will only return up to the value of index.max_result_window for that index. To get more records, you can use ScrollElasticsearchHttp afterwards. NOTE: QueryElasticsearchHttp expects a query that will work as the "q" parameter of the URL. This "mini-language" does not support all fields/operators (see here for more details).

For your use case, you likely need InvokeHttp in order to issue the kind of query you describe. This article describes how to issue a query for the last 15 minutes. Once your results are returned, you might need some combination of EvaluateJsonPath and/or SplitJson to work with the individual documents, see the Elasticsearch REST API documentation (and NiFi processor documentation) for more details.