Multiple filters and an aggregate in elasticsearch

Question

How can I use a filter in connection with an aggregate in elasticsearch?

The official documentation gives only trivial examples for filter and for aggregations and no formal description of the query dsl - compare it eg with postgres documentation .

Through trying out I found following query, which is accepted by elasticsearch (no parsing errors), but ignores the given filters:

{
  "filter": {
    "and": [
      {
        "term": {
          "_type": "logs"
        }
      },
      {
        "term": {
          "dc": "eu-west-12"
        }
      },
      {
        "term": {
          "status": "204"
        }
      },
      {
        "range": {
          "@timestamp": {
            "from": 1398169707,
            "to": 1400761707
          }
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  "size": 0,
  "aggs": {
    "time_histo": {
      "date_histogram": {
        "field": "@timestamp",
        "interval": "1h"
      },
      "aggs": {
        "name": {
          "percentiles": {
            "field": "upstream_response_time",
            "percents": [
              98.0
            ]
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Some people suggest using query instead of filter . But the official documentation generally recommends the opposite for filtering on exact values. Another issue with query : while filters offer an and , query does not.

Can somebody point me to documentation, a blog or a book, which describe writing non-trivial queries: at least an aggregate plus multiple filters.

Answer 1

I ended up using a filter aggregation - not filtered query. So now I have 3 nested aggs elements.

I also use bool filter instead of and as recommended by @alex-brasetvik because of http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/all-about-elasticsearch-filter-bitsets/

My final implementation:

{
  "aggs": {
    "filtered": {
      "filter": {
        "bool": {
          "must": [
            {
              "term": {
                "_type": "logs"
              }
            },
            {
              "term": {
                "dc": "eu-west-12"
              }
            },
            {
              "term": {
                "status": "204"
              }
            },
            {
              "range": {
                "@timestamp": {
                  "from": 1398176502000,
                  "to": 1400768502000
                }
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      },
      "aggs": {
        "time_histo": {
          "date_histogram": {
            "field": "@timestamp",
            "interval": "1h"
          },
          "aggs": {
            "name": {
              "percentiles": {
                "field": "upstream_response_time",
                "percents": [
                  98.0
                ]
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "size": 0
}

Answer 2

Put your filter in a filtered -query.

The top-level filter is for filtering search hits only, and not facets/aggregations. It was renamed to post_filter in 1.0 due to this quite common confusion.

Also, you might want to look into this post on why you often want to use bool and not and / or : http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/all-about-elasticsearch-filter-bitsets/

Answer 3

more on @geekQ 's answer: to support filter string with space char,for multipal term search,use below:

{   "aggs": {
    "aggresults": {
      "filter": {
        "bool": {
          "must": [
            {
              "match_phrase": {
                "term_1": "some text with space 1"
              }
            },
            {
              "match_phrase": {
                "term_2": "some text with also space 2"
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      },
      "aggs" : {
            "all_term_3s" : {
                "terms" : {
                    "field":"term_3.keyword",
                    "size" : 10000,
                    "order" : {
                        "_term" : "asc" 
                    }
                }
           }
        }
    }   },   "size": 0 }

Answer 4

Just for reference, as for the version 7.2 , I tried with something as follows to achieve multiple filters for aggregation:

• filter aggregation to filter for aggregation
• use bool to set up the compound query

POST movies/_search?size=0
{
  "size": 0,
  "aggs": {
    "test": {
      "filter": {
        "bool": {
          "must": {
            "term": {
              "genre": "action"
            }
          },
          "filter": {
            "range": {
              "year": {
                "gte": 1800,
                "lte": 3000
              }
            }
          }
        }
      },
      "aggs": {
        "year_hist": {
          "histogram": {
            "field": "year",
            "interval": 50
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}