Troubleshooting and FAQ

This guide will discuss frequently asked questions and how to resolve common problems with Elasticsearch.

Note

🤓 Troubleshooting unsuccessful or issue not described?

If you can’t solve your issue using the provided troubleshooting steps or can’t find your particular issue described here, feel free to ask the community for technical assistance.

Data Missing From the Web-UI / Search Data Missing or Incomplete

A commonly reported issue is data missing from the Web-UI. This could be tickets, articles, users or anything else indexed by Elasticsearch and can be caused by missing or incomplete indexes.

If you are experiencing this issue and installed Elasticsearch according to Elasticsearch, please follow these steps to make sure Elasticsearch is working correctly.

Step 1: Verify Elasticsearch is running

Check Elasticsearch status:

$ systemctl status elasticsearch

This should output something like the following, make sure it says Active: active (running):

● elasticsearch.service - Elasticsearch
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/elasticsearch.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Tue 2021-07-20 09:38:21 UTC; 1h 4min ago
   Docs: https://www.elastic.co
   Main PID: 1790 (java)

Otherwise, try starting it and check again:

$ sudo systemctl restart elasticsearch

$ sudo systemctl status elasticsearch

Warning

If this fails, your Elasticsearch installation is probably broken.

Try completely purging and reinstalling Elasticsearch according to Elasticsearch

Step 2: Verify the ingest-attachment plugin is installed correctly

List installed Elasticsearch plugins:

$ /usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch-plugin list

The output should include ingest-attachment.

Otherwise, try reinstalling the ingest-attachment plugin and check again:

$ /usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch-plugin remove ingest-attachment

$ /usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch-plugin install ingest-attachment

$ sudo systemctl restart elasticsearch

$ /usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch-plugin list

Step 3: Verify Zammad can access Elasticsearch and rebuild the indexes

Without specifying CPU cores to use:

$ zammad run rake zammad:searchindex:rebuild

With specifying the amount of CPU cores to use (example: 8):

$ zammad run rake zammad:searchindex:rebuild[8]

This should start rebuilding the indexes and output it’s progress:

Dropping indexes... done.
Deleting pipeline... done.
Creating indexes... done.
Creating pipeline... done.
Reloading data...
   - Chat::Session...
      done in 0 seconds.
   - Cti::Log...
      done in 0 seconds.

[...]

Depending on the system performance and amount of data, this can take a while to complete. Please let this task finish completely and wait until it drops you back to the console.

If this fails or throws an error, there might be something else wrong with your installation. Make sure you followed the complete Elasticsearch set up and integration procedure according to Elasticsearch.

Tip

In many situations where you’re not successful with above steps, you may want to check Elasticsearch’s log file: /var/log/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.log.

After completing these steps, you should have verified your Elasticsearch installation is running and rebuilt the indexes. If this does not resolve your issue, feel free to ask the community.