Aggregating data for faster performance

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By default, datafeeds fetch data from Elasticsearch using search and scroll requests. It can be significantly more efficient, however, to aggregate data in Elasticsearch and to configure your anomaly detection jobs to analyze aggregated data.

One of the benefits of aggregating data this way is that Elasticsearch automatically distributes these calculations across your cluster. You can then feed this aggregated data into the machine learning features instead of raw results, which reduces the volume of data that must be considered while detecting anomalies.

If you use a terms aggregation and the cardinality of a term is high but still significantly less than your total number of documents, use composite aggregations [preview] Support for composite aggregations inside datafeeds is currently experimental .

Requirements and limitations

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There are some limitations to using aggregations in datafeeds.

Your aggregation must include a date_histogram aggregation or a top level composite aggregation, which in turn must contain a max aggregation on the time field. This requirement ensures that the aggregated data is a time series and the timestamp of each bucket is the time of the last record in the bucket.

The name of the aggregation and the name of the field that it operates on need to match, otherwise the aggregation doesn’t work. For example, if you use a max aggregation on a time field called responsetime, the name of the aggregation must be also responsetime.

You must consider the interval of the date_histogram or composite aggregation carefully. The bucket span of your anomaly detection job must be divisible by the value of the calendar_interval or fixed_interval in your aggregation (with no remainder). If you specify a frequency for your datafeed, it must also be divisible by this interval. Anomaly detection jobs cannot use date_histogram or composite aggregations with an interval measured in months because the length of the month is not fixed; they can use weeks or smaller units.

As a rule of thumb, if your detectors use metric or sum analytical functions, set the date_histogram or composite aggregation interval to a tenth of the bucket span. This suggestion creates finer, more granular time buckets, which are ideal for this type of analysis. If your detectors use count or rare functions, set the interval to the same value as the bucket span.

If your datafeed uses aggregations with nested terms aggs and model plot is not enabled for the anomaly detection job, neither the Single Metric Viewer nor the Anomaly Explorer can plot and display an anomaly chart for the job. In these cases, the charts are not visible and an explanatory message is shown.

Your datafeed can contain multiple aggregations, but only the ones with names that match values in the job configuration are fed to the job.

Including aggregations in anomaly detection jobs
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When you create or update an anomaly detection job, you can include the names of aggregations, for example:

PUT _ml/anomaly_detectors/farequote
{
  "analysis_config": {
    "bucket_span": "60m",
    "detectors": [{
      "function": "mean",
      "field_name": "responsetime",  
      "by_field_name": "airline"  
    }],
    "summary_count_field_name": "doc_count"
  },
  "data_description": {
    "time_field":"time"  
  },
  "datafeed_config":{
    "indices": ["farequote"],
    "aggregations": {
      "buckets": {
        "date_histogram": {
          "field": "time",
          "fixed_interval": "360s",
          "time_zone": "UTC"
        },
        "aggregations": {
          "time": {  
            "max": {"field": "time"}
          },
          "airline": {  
            "terms": {
             "field": "airline",
              "size": 100
            },
            "aggregations": {
              "responsetime": {  
                "avg": {
                  "field": "responsetime"
                }
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

The airline, responsetime, and time fields are aggregations. Only the aggregated fields defined in the analysis_config object are analyzed by the anomaly detection job.

The aggregations have names that match the fields that they operate on. The max aggregation is named time and its field also needs to be time.

The term aggregation is named airline and its field is also named airline.

The avg aggregation is named responsetime and its field is also named responsetime.

When the summary_count_field_name property is set to a non-null value, the job expects to receive aggregated input. The property must be set to the name of the field that contains the count of raw data points that have been aggregated. It applies to all detectors in the job.

If you are using a term aggregation to gather influencer or partition field information, consider using a composite aggregation. It performs better than a date_histogram with a nested term aggregation and also includes all the values of the field instead of the top values per bucket.

Using composite aggregations in anomaly detection jobs
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This functionality is in technical preview and may be changed or removed in a future release. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

For composite aggregation support, there must be exactly one date_histogram value source. That value source must not be sorted in descending order. Additional composite aggregation value sources are allowed, such as terms.

A datafeed that uses composite aggregations may not be as performant as datafeeds that use scrolling or date histogram aggregations. Composite aggregations are optimized for queries that are either match_all or range filters. Other types of queries may cause the composite aggregation to be ineffecient.

Here is an example that uses a composite aggregation instead of a date_histogram.

This is an example of a job with a datafeed that uses a composite aggregation to bucket the metrics based on time and terms:

PUT _ml/anomaly_detectors/farequote-composite
{
  "analysis_config": {
    "bucket_span": "60m",
    "detectors": [{
      "function": "mean",
      "field_name": "responsetime",
      "by_field_name": "airline"
    }],
    "summary_count_field_name": "doc_count"
  },
  "data_description": {
    "time_field":"time"
  },
  "datafeed_config":{
    "indices": ["farequote"],
    "aggregations": {
      "buckets": {
        "composite": {
          "size": 1000,  
          "sources": [
            {
              "time_bucket": {  
                "date_histogram": {
                  "field": "time",
                  "fixed_interval": "360s",
                  "time_zone": "UTC"
                }
              }
            },
            {
              "airline": {  
                "terms": {
                  "field": "airline"
                }
              }
            }
          ]
        },
        "aggregations": {
          "time": {  
            "max": {
              "field": "time"
            }
          },
          "responsetime": { 
            "avg": {
              "field": "responsetime"
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Provide the size to the composite agg to control how many resources are used when aggregating the data. A larger size means a faster datafeed but more cluster resources are used when searching.

The required date_histogram composite aggregation source. Make sure it is named differently than your desired time field.

Instead of using a regular term aggregation, adding a composite aggregation term source with the name airline works. Note its name is the same as the field.

The required max aggregation whose name is the time field in the job analysis config.

The avg aggregation is named responsetime and its field is also named responsetime.

Nested aggregations in datafeeds

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Datafeeds support complex nested aggregations. This example uses the derivative pipeline aggregation to find the first order derivative of the counter system.network.out.bytes for each value of the field beat.name.

derivative or other pipeline aggregations may not work within composite aggregations. See composite aggregations and pipeline aggregations.

"aggregations": {
  "beat.name": {
    "terms": {
      "field": "beat.name"
    },
    "aggregations": {
      "buckets": {
        "date_histogram": {
          "field": "@timestamp",
          "fixed_interval": "5m"
        },
        "aggregations": {
          "@timestamp": {
            "max": {
              "field": "@timestamp"
            }
          },
          "bytes_out_average": {
            "avg": {
              "field": "system.network.out.bytes"
            }
          },
          "bytes_out_derivative": {
            "derivative": {
              "buckets_path": "bytes_out_average"
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Single bucket aggregations in datafeeds

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Datafeeds not only supports multi-bucket aggregations, but also single bucket aggregations. The following shows two filter aggregations, each gathering the number of unique entries for the error field.

{
  "job_id":"servers-unique-errors",
  "indices": ["logs-*"],
  "aggregations": {
    "buckets": {
      "date_histogram": {
        "field": "time",
        "interval": "360s",
        "time_zone": "UTC"
      },
      "aggregations": {
        "time": {
          "max": {"field": "time"}
        }
        "server1": {
          "filter": {"term": {"source": "server-name-1"}},
          "aggregations": {
            "server1_error_count": {
              "value_count": {
                "field": "error"
              }
            }
          }
        },
        "server2": {
          "filter": {"term": {"source": "server-name-2"}},
          "aggregations": {
            "server2_error_count": {
              "value_count": {
                "field": "error"
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Defining aggregations in datafeeds

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When you define an aggregation in a datafeed, it must have one of the following forms:

When using a date_histogram aggregation to bucket by time:

"aggregations": {
  ["bucketing_aggregation": {
    "bucket_agg": {
      ...
    },
    "aggregations": {
      "data_histogram_aggregation": {
        "date_histogram": {
          "field": "time",
        },
        "aggregations": {
          "timestamp": {
            "max": {
              "field": "time"
            }
          },
          [,"<first_term>": {
            "terms":{...
            }
            [,"aggregations" : {
              [<sub_aggregation>]+
            } ]
          }]
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

When using a composite aggregation:

"aggregations": {
  "composite_agg": {
    "sources": [
      {
        "date_histogram_agg": {
          "field": "time",
          ...settings...
        }
      },
      ...other valid sources...
      ],
      ...composite agg settings...,
      "aggregations": {
        "timestamp": {
            "max": {
              "field": "time"
            }
          },
          ...other aggregations...
          [
            [,"aggregations" : {
              [<sub_aggregation>]+
            } ]
          }]
      }
   }
}

The top level aggregation must be exclusively one of the following:

  • A bucket aggregation containing a single sub-aggregation that is a date_histogram
  • A top level aggregation that is a date_histogram
  • A top level aggregation is a composite aggregation

There must be exactly one date_histogram, composite aggregation. For more information, see Date histogram aggregation and Composite aggregation.

The time_zone parameter in the date histogram aggregation must be set to UTC, which is the default value.

Each histogram or composite bucket has a key, which is the bucket start time. This key cannot be used for aggregations in datafeeds, however, because they need to know the time of the latest record within a bucket. Otherwise, when you restart a datafeed, it continues from the start time of the histogram or composite bucket and possibly fetches the same data twice. The max aggregation for the time field is therefore necessary to provide the time of the latest record within a bucket.

You can optionally specify a terms aggregation, which creates buckets for different values of a field.

If you use a terms aggregation, by default it returns buckets for the top ten terms. Thus if the cardinality of the term is greater than 10, not all terms are analyzed. In this case, consider using composite aggregations [preview] Support for composite aggregations inside datafeeds is currently experimental .

You can change this behavior by setting the size parameter. To determine the cardinality of your data, you can run searches such as:

GET .../_search
{
  "aggs": {
    "service_cardinality": {
      "cardinality": {
        "field": "service"
      }
    }
  }
}

By default, Elasticsearch limits the maximum number of terms returned to 10000. For high cardinality fields, the query might not run. It might return errors related to circuit breaking exceptions that indicate that the data is too large. In such cases, use composite aggregations in your datafeed. For more information, see Terms aggregation.

You can also optionally specify multiple sub-aggregations. The sub-aggregations are aggregated for the buckets that were created by their parent aggregation. For more information, see Aggregations.