Manual rebuild of Search Server indexes

Products

• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

Finding that even after running pdm_es_rebuild_index, the Search Server indexes remain as they are.  How to manually remove the indexes

Environment

Release : 17.3

Cause

Index removal prior to running an index rebuild may be necessary if the indexes are not refreshing.  A possible cause is that there are multiple indices listed in the ElasticSearch Head plugin.

Resolution

1. Download/install the ElasticSearch Head Plugin in Chrome from Chrome web store
   
   
   
2. Access the ElasticSearch Head plugin and enter the given Search Server implementation
   
   
3. On the Overhead tab, choose a given index, and click the Actions button, choosing "Delete"
   
   
   
   
4. You will get a prompt to type 'DELETE' to remove the given index.  Enter 'DELETE' (all caps) then choose "OK"
   
   
   
   
5. The given index will be deleted.

 

Additional Information

You may need to delete ALL of the indexes in the Search Server before running a rebuild.  This is because the full index rebuild may fail if there are any other existing indexes which have been corrupted or duplicated.

Indexes that start with ".geoip" or ".ds" may be ignored as these are system indexes which cannot be removed in this fashion (there are about 6-7 of these)