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OpenSearch is a powerful, open-source analytics and search engine that can be utilized to construct custom search solutions for a broad variety of applications, from websites to enterprise-level systems. It enables flexible search and indexing abilities, making it suitable for a range of uses, a great example of this is scalability. OpenSearch is designed for horizontal scalability, enabling organizations to input additional nodes to their cluster as data volumes and query loads increase. This scalability is essential for handling large datasets and high traffic.
Whilst the platform has extensive capabilities built-in, it can be further strengthened with the effective use of OpenSearch plugins. The OpenSearch engine enables the use of plugins to enhance the operation of the tool. Within this article, we will outline what OpenSearch plugins are and a list of the best plugins available that you can utilize to get the most out of your OpenSearch system.
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What are OpenSearch Plugins?
OpenSearch plugins are add-ons that improve and expand the functionality of the AWS founded OpenSearch search and analytics engine. They enable you to customize, tailor, or augment your OpenSearch deployment to suit specific use cases, and various business needs. These plugins integrate seamlessly with the core OpenSearch engine, enabling you to expand its abilities without modifying the primary codebase.
As a whole, OpenSearch plugins play a pivotal role in extending the capabilities of the OpenSearch engine, making it a versatile and adaptable solution for various use cases, from enterprise search and log analysis to real-time data analytics and monitoring. Users can select, configure, and combine plugins to build tailored solutions that meet their specific business needs.
OpenSearch Plugins
To ensure you get the most out of OpenSearch and its wide variety of plugins, we have outlined some of the best plugins currently available that you can adopt to further elevate your system.
OpenSearch Security Plugin
This plugin amplifies security by supplying features like authentication, role-based access control, and auditing. It ensures that only authorized users and applications can access data in your OpenSearch cluster. The plugin provides full data in transit encryption, PKI authentication, role-based cluster-level access control, and many other features.
OpenSearch Index Management Plugin
This plugin enables the automation of index management tasks, it aims to enhance storage and performance whilst streamlining index maintenance. With this plugin, you’ll be able to outline custom policies, in order to improve and maintain indices and apply them to index patterns.
Every policy holds a default state and a list of states that you characterize for the index to transition between. Inside every state, you can characterize a list of actions to execute and transitions to input a new state based on specific conditions. Some examples of supported actions are, delete, close, open, notification, and read-only.
Prometheus Exporter Plugin
If you utilize Prometheus for monitoring, then this plugin will enable you to export OpenSearch metrics to Prometheus. Harnessing the potential of OpenSearch REST API, you’ll be able to monitor the performance and health of your OpenSearch cluster making use of Prometheus and Grafana. Currently, some of the available metrics for this plugin are cluster status, node status, indices status, and cluster settings.
OpenSearch Alerting Plugin
With the OpenSearch alerting plugin you can outline and trigger alerts based on predetermined conditions and thresholds. They aid you in proactively responding to critical events and anomalies in your data. When trigger conditions are reached, you can publish messages to the following destinations, Slack, custom webhook, Amazon Chime, and email.
ML Commons Plugin
The Machine Learning Commons OpenSearch plugin allows you to apply machine learning algorithms to your data for jobs such as anomaly detection, forecasting, and classification. These features are implemented by providing a set of common machine learning (ML) algorithms through transport and REST API calls. This enables the user to leverage existing open-source ML algorithms and diminish the effort needed to develop new ML features.
OpenSearch Dashboards Maps Plugin
OpenSearch Dashboards Maps is a frontend plugin that aids you in uploading custom GeoJSON to OpenSearch and communicates with the geospatial backend plugin. With OpenSearch Dashboards, you can produce maps to visualize your geographical data. OpenSearch enables you to construct map visualizations with many layers, merging data across dissimilar indexes. You can construct each layer from a different index pattern. Additionally, you can configure maps to highlight specific data at different zoom levels.
Cross-Cluster Plugin
With the Cross-Cluster plugin, you can search and collect data from many OpenSearch clusters, making it beneficial for organizations with distributed data across multiple clusters. This plugin has a range of use cases, one of which is to reduce query latency. For critical business needs, answering the customer query in the fasted amount of time is vital. Replicating data to a cluster that is nearest to the user can drastically reduce the query latency. Applications can redirect the customer query to the closest data centre where data has been replicated.
Anomaly Detection Plugin
The OpenSearch Anomaly Detection plugin enables users to utilize machine learning-based algorithms to automatically find anomalies as their log data is ingested. The intuitive OpenSearch Dashboards interface, and a powerful API, make it simple to set up, tune, and monitor your anomaly detectors. Also, you can pair this plugin with the alerting plugin to produce monitors based on generated anomaly detectors. A scheduled monitor run checks the anomaly detection results frequently and gathers anomalies to trigger alerts based on custom trigger conditions.
Job Scheduler Plugin
With the OpenSearch Job Scheduler plugin, you can plan periodical jobs running with OpenSearch nodes by utilizing the plugin framework. Also, this plugin can easily be extended to enable scheduled jobs like running aggregation queries against raw data and saving the aggregated data into a new index every hour or observing the shard allocation by calling OpenSearch API and sending the output to a Webhook.
Observability Plugin
The final plugin in the list is the OpenSearch Observability plugin. This plugin is actually a collection of plugins and applications and has four components, trace analytics, event analytics, operational panels, and notebooks. This plugin lets you view data-driven events by using Piped Processing Language to explore, discover, and query data stored in OpenSearch.
If you enjoyed this article then why not read our article on OpenSearch Dashboards vs Kibana or The Top Elasticsearch Use Cases next?