OpenSearch - Getting started

Last updated March 3rd, 2023

Objectives

OpenSearch is an open-source search and analytics suite used for a variety of use cases related to log and data analysis, real-time monitoring, and application searching. Forked from Elasticsearch and Kibana, OpenSearch offers users a highly-scalable system with easy access to large amounts of data and integrated metrics.

This guide explains how to successfully configure a Public Cloud Databases for an OpenSearch service in the OVHcloud Control Panel.

Requirements

• access to the OVHcloud Control Panel
• a Public Cloud project in your OVHcloud account

Instructions

Subscribe to the service

Log in to your OVHcloud Control Panel and switch to Public Cloud in the top navigation bar. After selecting your Public Cloud project, click on Databases in the left-hand navigation bar under Storage.

Click on the button Create a database instance. (Create a service if your project already contains databases.)

Step 1: Select your database type

Click on the type of database you want to use and then select the version to install from the respective drop-down menu. Click on Next to continue.

Step 2: Select a solution

In this step, choose an appropriate service plan. If needed, you will be able to upgrade the plan after creation.

Please visit the capabilities page of your selected database type for detailed information on each plan's properties.

Click on Next to continue.

Step 3: Select a location

Choose the geographical region of the datacenter in which your service will be hosted.

Click on Next to continue.

Step 4: Size the database nodes

You can increase the number of nodes and choose the node template in this step. The initial and maximum number of nodes depends on the solution chosen in step 2.

Please visit the capabilities page of your selected database type for detailed information on the hardware resources and other properties of the database installation.

Take note of the pricing information and click on Next to continue.

Step 5: Configure your options

You can name your database in this step and decide to attach a public or private network. Please note that attaching to a private network is a feature we are currently working on and public is the only network option available at this time.

Step 6: Review and confirm

The final section will display a summary of your order as well as the API equivalent of creating this database instance with the OVHcloud API.

In a matter of minutes, your new database service will be deployed. Messages in the OVHcloud Control Panel will inform you when the database is ready to use.

Configure the OpenSearch service

Once the Public Cloud Databases for OpenSearch service is up and running, you will have to define at least one user and one authorised IP in order to fully connect to the service.

The General information tab should inform you to create users and authorized IPs.

Step 1 (mandatory): set up a user

Switch to the Users tab. An admin user is pre-configured during the service installation. You can add more users by clicking on the button Add user.

Enter a username, then click Create User.

Once the user is created, the password is generated. Please keep it securely as it will not be shown again.

Passwords can be initialized for the admin user or changed for all afterwards in the Users tab.

Step 2 (mandatory): configure authorised IPs

Switch to the Authorized IPs tab. At least one IP address must be authorised here before you can connect to your database. It can be your laptop IP for example.

Clicking on Add an IP address or IP address block (CIDR) opens a new window in which you can add single IP addresses or blocks to allow access to the database.

You can edit and remove database access via the ... button in the IP table.

If you don't know how to get your IP, please visit a website such as www.WhatismyIP.com. Copy the IP address numbers shown on this website and save them for later.

Your OpenSearch service is now fully accessible!

Optionally, you can configure access control lists (ACL) for granular permissions.

Optional: configure ACLs

OpenSearch database supports index-level access control lists (ACLs) to control permissions. This approach allows you to limit the operations that are available to specific connections and to restrict access to certain data sets, which improves the security of your data.

You first have to enable the ACLs functionality, and then you can add ACLs for all users:

You can grant the following permissions:

• Administrator: full access to APIs and documents
• Read-only: allows only searching and retrieving documents
• Write: allows updating, adding, and deleting documents
• Read and write: full access to documents
• none: no access

Note: Write permission allows the service user to create new indexes that match the pattern, but it does not allow deletion of those indexes.

Rules are defined separately for each user as permission / index model combinations. The index model, also called pattern, defines the indexes that the permission applies to. Patterns are glob-style, where * matches any number of characters and ? matches any character.

When multiple rules match, they are applied in the order listed above. If ACLs are enabled and no rules match, access is denied.

Control access to top-level APIs

OpenSearch has several “top-level” API endpoints (_mget, _msearch, and so on), where you have to grant access separately. To do this, use patterns similar to the index patterns, for example:

• Administrator/_* would grant unlimited access to all top-level APIs
• Administrator/_msearch grants unlimited access to the _msearch API only

Access control and OpenSearch Dashboards

Enabling ACLs does not restrict access to OpenSearch Dashboards itself, but all requests done by OpenSearch Dashboards are checked against the current user’s ACLs.

In practice, for OpenSearch Dashboards to work properly, you must grant the user admin-level access to the _msearch interface (permission: Administrator, pattern: _msearch).

Advanced configuration

Indexes

An index contains a database schema. Each data is based on a basic unit which is a JSON document, indexed with a unique ID. Indexing is the method used to store data and by the search engine for fast retrieval.

You can learn more browsing the OpenSearch official documentation - Index data

It's not mandatory, but if needed, you can add new indexes in the OpenSearch database.

Please enter the name of the index that you want to create.

Automatic backups

OVHcloud performs daily backups for your Public Cloud Databases for the OpenSearch service. To find them, switch to the Backups tab. Backups will be created automatically, and retention time depends on the service plan. Please visit the Public Cloud Databases for OpenSearch capabilities page for detailed information on each plan's properties.

You can restore and delete backups via the ... button.

Connection to the OpenSearch Dashboard

From the General information tab from the Public Cloud Databases for OpenSearch service, you can get the Kibana service URI. Use it to combine with the user login and password in a web browser and you will go to this page:

Load sample data

As proposed natively in OpenSearch, we can load sample data to the OpenSearch database:

For the following example, we will use the Sample web logs.

Once imported, you can get access to the main OpenSearch dashboard created for this sample. Click on the View Data button:

Dashboard and queries can be edited directly through this web interface.

Load your data

If you want to load your own data, you have multiple ways. Please take a look at the official documentation: https://opensearch.org/docs/latest/clients/agents-and-ingestion-tools/index/.

Query the OpenSearch service

DB queries with cURL

Once the service is up and configured, you can try to connect from a remote session to it. You need to have at least:

• the user login and password, with accurate ACLs if enabled;
• the URI of the OpenSearch database service. It can be found in the General information tab.

Once ready, try this in a command line, with your personal user and password:

export OPENSEARCH_URI=https://user1:2fakeSVV5wvyPykF@opensearch-682faf00-682faf00.database.cloud.ovh.net:20184

Then try to connect :

curl $OPENSEARCH_URI

The database response should be similar to:

{
"name" : "opensearch-682faf00-1",
"cluster_name" : "ba1b1006-776a-4686-9c3c-9f65d4d73467",
"cluster_uuid" : "UoyMAkrISd6r1rIVYn4q5g",
"version" : {
"distribution" : "opensearch",
"number" : "1.1.0",
"build_type" : "unknown",
"build_hash" : "unknown",
"build_date" : "2021-11-15T16:09:53.881093Z",
"build_snapshot" : false,
"lucene_version" : "8.9.0",
"minimum_wire_compatibility_version" : "6.8.0",
"minimum_index_compatibility_version" : "6.0.0-beta1"
},
"tagline" : "The OpenSearch Project: https://opensearch.org/"
}

Now create an index:

curl -X PUT $OPENSEARCH_URI/my-index

In case of a wrongly defined ACL for the user, the response will be similar to :

<html><body>
<h1>403 Forbidden</h1>
Request forbidden by administrative rules.<br/>
(reason: PUT /my-index/ not allowed)
</body></html>

Try to add a document:

curl -X PUT $OPENSEARCH_URI/my-index/_doc/1' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"Description": "To be or not to be, that is the question."}'

Retrieve the data:

curl -X GET $OPENSEARCH_URI/my-index/_doc/1

Delete the data:

curl -X DELETE $OPENSEARCH_URI/my-index/_doc/1

Delete the index:

curl -X DELETE $OPENSEARCH_URI/my-index/

DB queries with the Dashboard Dev Tool

For direct queries with a web interface to the OpenSearch database you can use the Dev Tools available in the menu:

The Console is split in two, a left column for the command to execute, and the right one for the results.

Click on the triangle to execute the highlighted request.

We can execute the same commands as we did with cURL:

Go further

You service is now configured. To go further,

OpenSearch capabilities

OpenSearch Official documentation

Visit the Github examples repository to find how to connect to your database with several languages.

Visit our dedicated Discord channel: https://discord.gg/ovhcloud. Ask questions, provide feedback and interact directly with the team that builds our databases services.

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