ILM: Manage the index lifecycle

You can configure index lifecycle management (ILM) policies to automatically manage indices according to your performance, resiliency, and retention requirements. For example, you could use ILM to:

• Spin up a new index when an index reaches a certain size or number of documents
• Create a new index each day, week, or month and archive previous ones
• Delete stale indices to enforce data retention standards

You can create and manage index lifecycle policies through Kibana Management or the ILM APIs. When you enable index lifecycle management for Beats or the Logstash Elasticsearch output plugin, default policies are configured automatically.

To automatically back up your indices and manage snapshots, use snapshot lifecycle policies.

• Overview
• Concepts
• Automate rollover
• Manage Filebeat time-based indices
• Configure a lifecycle policy
• Resolve lifecycle policy execution errors
• Start and stop index lifecycle management
• Manage existing indices
• Skip rollover
• Restore a managed data stream or index
• Index lifecycle management API
• Index lifecycle actions