OpenSearch - Getting Started – Articles

Learn how to configure a Managed Database (also called Cloud Database) for an OpenSearch service in the OVHcloud Control Panel.

OpenSearch is an open-source search and analytics suite used for various 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.

Requirements

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

Instructions

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 Data Analysis in the left-hand navigation bar under Databases & Analytics.

Click on the button Create a database instance (click 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 (if available) select the version to install from the drop-down menu.

Step 2: Select a service plan

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

Please visit the OpenSearch - Capabilities and Limitations guide for detailed information on each plan's properties.

Step 3: Select a region

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

Step 4: Select the node type

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 OpenSearch - Capabilities and Limitations guide for detailed information on the hardware resources and other properties of the database installation.

Step 5: Cluster sizing

Here you can add additional storage. Please take note of the pricing information.

Step 6: Configure your options

Decide whether to attach your database to a public network or a private network. If you select a Private network (vRack) you will need to select a network and subnetwork to attach.

Step 7: Review and confirm

The panel on the right side of the screen will display a summary of your order as well as the OVHcloud API and Terraform equivalents of creating this database instance.

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 OpenSearch service is up and running, you will have to define at least one user and one authorized IP to fully connect to the service.

The General information tab should inform you to authorize IPs.

Step 1 (mandatory): Set up a new 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 secure as it will not be shown again.

Passwords can be created for the admin user or changed for all afterward in the Users tab by clicking the more options ... button in that user's row of the table.

Step 2 (mandatory): Configure authorized IPs

NOTE: For security reasons, the default network configuration doesn't allow any incoming connections. You must authorize suitable IP addresses to successfully access your database.

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

Clicking on + Add an IP address or IP 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 more options ... 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.

Success! Your OpenSearch service is now fully accessible!

Optionally, you can configure access control lists (ACLs) 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 the 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 by browsing the OpenSearch official indexing documentation.

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 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 read the OpenSearch - Capabilities and Limitations guide for detailed information on each plan's properties.

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

Connection to the OpenSearch Dashboard

NOTE: Verify that the IP address visible from your browser application is part of the "Authorized IPs" defined for this OpenSearch Database service.

From the General information tab from the 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

NOTE: If you have enabled ACLs in a previous step and don't want to disable them, then make sure your user is granted read and write permissions to:

opensearch_dashboards_sample_data_*
_bulk
_mget

Without these permissions, you cannot add the sample data and view the corresponding dashboard.

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:

The dashboard and queries can be edited directly through this web interface.

Load your data

If you want to load your data, you have multiple ways. Please take a look at the official OpenSearch documentation.

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.

NOTE: Verify that the IP address of your system running the cURL command is part of the Authorised IPs defined for this OpenSearch Database service.

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.us: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 a 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

Your service is now configured. To go further, view the OpenSearch Official documentation or visit the GitHub examples repository to find out how to connect to your database with several languages.

For more information and tutorials, please see our other Cloud Databases support guides or explore the guides for other OVHcloud products and services.

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