Resolving Elasticsearch Unassigned Shard Issues: X of Y shards failed
· 4 min read
When opening Kibana, you might sometimes see the error message “X of Y shards failed” which usually indicates that some indices have unassigned shards. In such cases, the Elasticsearch (ES) cluster status is typically Yellow or Red.
Let’s first understand the four shard states in ES:
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INITIALIZING - The shard is in the initialization state and unavailable. This occurs briefly when creating an index or starting a node.
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RELOCATING - Shards are being moved due to node addition or removal, a transient state.
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STARTED - The shard is active and available to handle requests.
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UNASSIGNED - The shard has failed to be allocated.