Repository containing a Rally track for simulating event-based data use-cases. The track supports bulk indexing of auto-generated events as well as simulated Kibana queries and a range of management operations to make the track self-contained.

This track can be used as-is, extended or adapted to better match your use case or simply be used as a example of how custom parameter sources and runners can be used to create more complex and realistic simulations and benchmarks.

Once Rally has been configured, modify the rally.ini file to link to the eventdata track repository:

[tracks]
default.url = https://github.com/elastic/rally-tracks
eventdata.url = https://github.com/elastic/rally-eventdata-track

The track can be run by specifying the following runtime parameters: --track=eventdata and --track-repository=eventdata

Another option is to download the repository and point to it using the --track-path command line parameter.

This is the default challenge, which performs bulk indexing at maximum throughput against a single index for a period of 20 minutes.

The table below shows the track parameters that can be adjusted along with default values:

This challenge performs bulk-indexing against a single index with varying bulk request sizes, ranging from 125 events/request to 50000 events/request.

The table below shows the track parameters that can be adjusted along with default values:

This challenge indexes 2 million events into an index consisting of a single shard 25 times. After each group of 2 million events has been inserted, 4 different Kibana dashboard configurations are benchmarked against the index. At this time no indexing takes place. There are two different dashboards being simulated, aggregating across 50% and 90% of the data in the shard.

This challenge shows how shard sizing can be performed and how the nature of queries used can impact the results.

The table below shows the track parameters that can be adjusted along with default values:

This challenge indexes 1 billion events into a number of indices of 2 primary shards each, and results in around 200GB of indices being generated on disk. This can vary depending on the environment. It can be used give an idea of how max indexing performance behaves over an extended period of time.

The table below shows the track parameters that can be adjusted along with default values:

This challenge runs mixed Kibana queries against the index created in the elasticlogs-1bn-load track. No concurrent indexing is performed.

This challenge assumes that the elasticlogs-1bn-load track has been executed as it simulates querying against these indices. It shows how indexing and querying through simulated Kibana dashboards can be combined to provide a more realistic benchmark.

In this challenge rate-limited indexing at varying levels is combined with a fixed level of querying. If metrics from the run are stored in Elasticsearch, it is possible analyse these in Kibana in order to identify how indexing rate affects query latency and vice versa.

The table below shows the track parameters that can be adjusted along with default values:

This challenge is suitable for long term execution and runs in two phases. Both phases (p1, p2) index documents containing auto-generated event, however, p1 indexes events at the max possible speed, whereas p2 throttles indexing to a specified rate and in parallel executes four queries simulating Kibana dashboards and queries. The created index gets rolled over after the configured max size and the maximum amount of rolled over indices are also configurable.

The table below shows the track parameters that can be adjusted along with default values:

The indices use the alias elasticlogs_q_write and start with elasticlogs_q-000001. As an example, for a cluster with rolled over indices: elasticlogs-000001, elasticlogs-000002, ... 000010 a value of max_rolledover_indices=8 results to the removal of elasticlogs-000001 and elasticlogs-000002.

A value of max_rolledover_indices=20 on a three node bare-metal cluster with the following specifications:

• CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz
• RAM: 32 GB
• SSD: 2 x Crucial MX200 in RAID-0 configuration
• OS: Linux Kernel version 4.13.0-38
• OS tuning:
  • Turbo boost disabled (/sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo)
  • THP at default madvise (/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/{defrag,enabled})
• JVM: Oracle JDK 1.8.0_131

ends up consuming a constant of 407GiB per node.

It is recommended to store any track parameters in a json file and pass them to Rally using --track-params=./params-file.json. Example content:

$ cat params-file.json
{
  "number_of_replicas": 1,
  "shard_count": 3,
  "p1_bulk_indexing_clients": 32,
  "p1_bulk_size": 1000,
  "p1_duration_secs": 28800,
  "p2_bulk_indexing_clients": 12,
  "p2_bulk_size": 1000,
  "p2_ops": 30,
  "max_rolledover_indices": 20,
  "rollover_max_size": "30gb"
}

This challenge examines the performance and memory usage of large shards. It indexes data into a single shard index ~25GB at a time and runs up to a shard size of ~300GB. After every 25GB that has been indexed, select index statistics are recorded and a number of simulated Kibana dashboards are run against the index to show how query performance varies with shard size.

This challenge will show the following:

• How dashboard query performance varies with shard size
• How memory usage varies with shard size

Note that this challenge will generate up to ~300GB of data on disk and will require additional space for merging and overhead. Make sure around 600GB of disk space is available before running this to be on the safe side.

The table below shows the track parameters that can be adjusted along with default values:

This challenge examines the storage and heap usage implications of a wide variety of document ID types. It indexes data into a set of ~25GB single shard index, each for a different type of document ID (auto, uuid, epoch_uuid, sha1, sha256, sha384, and sha512). For each index a refresh is then run before select index statistics are recorded.

Note that this challenge will generate up to ~200GB of data on disk and will require additional space for merging and overhead. Make sure around 300GB of disk space is available before running this to be on the safe side.

The table below shows the track parameters that can be adjusted along with default values:

This challenge examines the indexing throughput as a function of shard size as well as the resulting storage requirements for a set of different types of document IDs. For each document ID type, it indexes 200 million documents into a single-shard index, which should be about 40GB in size. Once all data has been indexed, index statistics are recorded before and after a forcemerge down to a single segment.

This challenge can be more CPU intensive that other tracks, so make sure the Rally node is powerful enough not to become the bottleneck.

The following document id types are benchmarked:

auto - This test uses document IDs autogenerated by Elasticsearch. This allows Elasticsearch to optimize for indexing speed as the operation can not be an update.

uuid - This test uses a UUID4 as document ID. This is largely random in nature and we have removed - characters that never change from it to make it a bit shorter.

sha1 - This test uses a SHA1 hash formatted as a hexadecimal string as document ID.

md5 - This test uses a MD5 hash formatted as a hexadecimal string as document ID.

epoch_uuid - This test uses an UUID string prefixed by the hexadecimal representation of an epoch timestamp. This makes identifiers largely ordered over time, which can have a positive impact on indexing throughput.

epoch_md5 - This test uses an base64 encoded MD5 hash prefixed by the hexadecimal representation of an epoch timestamp. This makes identifiers largely ordered over time, which can have a positive impact on indexing throughput.

epoch_md5-10pct/60s - This test uses the epoch_md5 identifier described above, but simulates a portion of events arriving delayed by setting the timestamp to 60s (1 minute) in the past for 10% of events.

epoch_md5-10pct/300s - This test uses the epoch_md5 identifier described above, but simulates a portion of events arriving delayed by setting the timestamp to 300s (5 minutes) in the past for 10% of events.

Note that this challenge will generate up to ~400GB of data on disk and will require additional space for merging and overhead. Make sure around 500GB of disk space is available before running this to be on the safe side.

The table below shows the track parameters that can be adjusted along with default values:

This parameter source generated bulk indexing requests filled with auto-generated data. This data is generated based on statistics from a subset of real traffic to the elastic.co website. Data has been anonymised and post-processed and is modelled on the format used by the Filebeat Nginx Module.

The generator allows data to be generated in real-time or against a set date/tine interval. A sample event will contain the following fields:

{
  "@timestamp": "2017-06-01T00:01:08.866644Z",
  "offset": 7631775,
  "user_name": "-",
  "source": "/usr/local/var/log/nginx/access.log",
  "fileset": {
    "module": "nginx",
    "name": "access"
  },
  "input": {
    "type": "log"
  },
  "beat": {
    "version": "6.3.0",
    "hostname": "web-EU-1.elastic.co",
    "name": "web-EU-1.elastic.co"
  },
  "prospector": {
    "type": "log"
  },
  "nginx": {
    "access": {
      "user_agent": {
        "major": "44",
        "os": "Mac OS X",
        "os_major": "10",
        "name": "Firefox",
        "os_name": "Mac OS X",
        "device": "Other"
      },
      "remote_ip": "5.134.208.0",
      "remote_ip_list": [
        "5.134.208.0"
      ],
      "geoip": {
        "continent_name": "Europe",
        "city_name": "Grupa",
        "country_name": "Poland",
        "country_iso_code": "PL",
        "location": {
          "lat": 53.5076,
          "lon": 18.6358
        }
      },
      "referrer": "https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/marvel/current/getting-started.html",
      "url": "/guide/en/kibana/current/images/autorefresh-pause.png",
      "body_sent": {
        "bytes": 2122
      },
      "method": "GET",
      "response_code": "200",
      "http_version": "1.1"
    }
  }
}

This parameter source supports simulating two different types of dashboards.

traffic - This dashboard contains 7 visualisations and presents different types of traffic statistics. In structure it is similar to the Nginx Overview dashboard that comes with the Filebeat Nginx Module. It does aggregate across all records in the index and is therefore a quite 'heavy' dashboard.

content_issues - This dashboard contains 5 visualisations and is designed to be used for analysis of records with a 404 response code, e.g. to find links that are no longer leading anywhere. This only aggregates across a small subset of the records in an index and is therefore considerably 'lighter' than the traffic dashboard.

discover - This simulates querying data through the Discover application in Kibana.

This track can be used as it is, but was designed so that it would be easy to extend or modify it. There are two directories named operations and challenges, containing files with the standard components of this track that can be used as an example. The main track.json file will automatically load all files with a .json suffix from these directories. This makes it simple to add new operations and challenges without having to update or modify any of the original files.

This track requires Elasticsearch 6.x. Earlier versions are not supported.

From time to time, setting and mapping formats change in Elasticsearch. As we want to be able to support multiple versions of Elasticsearch, we also need to version track specifications. Therefore, this repository contains multiple branches. The following examples should give you an idea how the versioning scheme works:

• master: tracks on this branch are compatible with the latest development version of Elasticsearch
• 6: compatible with all Elasticsearch 6.x releases.
• 2: compatible with all Elasticsearch releases with the major release number 2 (e.g. 2.1, 2.2, 2.2.1)
• 1.7: compatible with all Elasticsearch releases with the major release number 1 and minor release number 7 (e.g. 1.7.0, 1.7.1, 1.7.2)

As you can see, branches can match exact release numbers but Rally is also lenient in case settings mapping formats did not change for a few releases. Rally will try to match in the following order:

1. major.minor.patch-extension_label (e.g. 6.0.0-alpha2)
2. major.minor.patch (e.g. 6.2.3)
3. major.minor (e.g. 6.2)
4. major (e.g. 6)

Apart from that, the master branch is always considered to be compatible with the Elasticsearch master branch.

To specify the version to check against, add --distribution-version when running Rally. It it is not specified, Rally assumes that you want to benchmark against the Elasticsearch master version.

Example: If you want to benchmark Elasticsearch 6.2.4, run the following command:

esrally --distribution-version=6.2.4

If you want to contribute to this track, please ensure that it works against the master version of Elasticsearch (i.e. submit PRs against the master branch). We can then check whether it's feasible to backport the track to earlier Elasticsearch versions.

See all details in the contributor guidelines.

This software is licensed under the Apache License, version 2 ("ALv2"), quoted below.

Copyright 2015-2018 Elasticsearch https://www.elastic.co

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.