Quick start: Create a cluster and retrieve data

Step 1: Create a cluster (about 20 minutes)

• Log on to the Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch console. On the Elasticsearch Clusters page, click Create to go to the cluster purchase page. Configure the following key parameters and leave the other parameters at their default values.

• Click Buy Now and wait about 20 minutes until the cluster status changes to Active. Then you can proceed to the next step.

Step 2: Configure and log on to Kibana

The public endpoint of Kibana is enabled by default. For security reasons, public network access denies all IP addresses by default. To access Kibana, you must first add the IP address of the device that you want to use to the whitelist.

Access authentication uses two-factor verification. First, log on to your Alibaba Cloud account. Then, complete a second logon with the access credentials of the ES cluster, where the username is fixed as elastic with its corresponding logon password.

• In the left-side navigation pane, click Data Visualization. In the Kibana section, click Modify Configuration.

• In the Network Access Configuration section, configure the Kibana public access whitelist.

• Click Access over Internet. On the Kibana logon page, enter the username and password. After you log on successfully, you enter the Kibana console and can explore ES data.

• Username: fixed as elastic.

• Password: the password that you set when you created the ES cluster. If you forget it, you can reset the password.

• Go to the Developer Tools console and run the GET / command to query the cluster information.

  Verification: If the right pane returns a JSON object that contains information such as the version number and the cluster name, the connection is successful.

Step 3: Create an index

In Kibana Developer Tools, run a RESTful API operation to create an index (mapping) named product_info for wealth management product data.

PUT /product_info
{
  "settings": {
    "number_of_shards": 5,
    "number_of_replicas": 1
  },
  "mappings": {
      "properties": {
        "productName": {
          "type": "text",
          "analyzer": "ik_smart"
        },
        "annual_rate":{
          "type":"keyword"
        },
        "describe": {
          "type": "text",
          "analyzer": "ik_smart"
        }
    }
  }
}

Key parameter descriptions:

settings: defines the shard configuration of the index. For example, this configuration defines five primary shards and one replica for each primary shard. mappings: defines the index fields. For example, this configuration defines three fields: productName, annual_rate, and describe. Fields of the text type support tokenization and fuzzy search, and fields of the keyword type are used for exact value matching. For more information about field types, see Field data types. Verification: If the response contains "acknowledged": true and "shards_acknowledged": true, the index was created successfully.

Step 4: Insert data

Run the following code to bulk insert test data:

POST /product_info/_bulk
{"index":{}}
{"productName":"Wealth Management Product A","annual_rate":"3.2200%","describe":"180-day fixed-term product. Minimum investment: 20,000. Stable returns. Optional push notifications."}
{"index":{}}
{"productName":"Wealth Management Product B","annual_rate":"3.1100%","describe":"90-day scheduled investment product. Minimum investment: 10,000. Daily push notifications for credited returns."}
{"index":{}}
{"productName":"Wealth Management Product C","annual_rate":"3.3500%","describe":"270-day scheduled investment product. Minimum investment: 40,000. Daily push notifications for immediately credited returns."}
{"index":{}}
{"productName":"Wealth Management Product D","annual_rate":"3.1200%","describe":"90-day scheduled investment product. Minimum investment: 12,000. Daily push notifications for credited returns."}
{"index":{}}
{"productName":"Wealth Management Product E","annual_rate":"3.0100%","describe":"Recommended 30-day scheduled investment product. Minimum investment: 8,000. Daily return message notifications."}
{"index":{}}
{"productName":"Wealth Management Product F","annual_rate":"2.7500%","describe":"Popular short-term product. 3-day term, without any service fee. Minimum investment: 500. Return notifications by SMS."}

Verification: If the response contains "errors": false, the data was inserted successfully.

Step 5: Search for data

GET /product_info/_search
{
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "describe": "Daily push notifications for credited returns"
    }
  }
}

GET /product_info/_search
{
  "query": {
    "range": {
      "annual_rate": {
        "gte": "3.0000%",
        "lte": "3.1300%"
      }
    }
  }
}

Delete data and release the ES cluster

• Run the following code to delete the test index that you created in this topic.

DELETE /product_info

The following response is returned:

{
"acknowledged" : true
}

• Return to the cluster list in the Elasticsearch console.

• In the cluster list, find the cluster that you want to release. In the Actions column, click > Release Cluster, select Immediately Delete, and then click OK to release the cluster.

  Releasing a cluster permanently deletes the cluster and all the data in it. This action is irreversible, so proceed with caution.

Next steps

To learn more about ES, explore the following topics:

• Data ingestion or migration: collect or migrate your business data to ES.

  Before migration, assess your data volume to determine whether you need to upgrade the cluster configuration.

• AI services: Use RAG to enhance each stage of retrieval augmented generation. For more information, see Alibaba Cloud AI Search Solution.

• Performance tuning: Explore index design and query optimization techniques to improve cluster performance.

• Kibana visualization: Learn how to use Kibana features such as Discover and Dashboard to create data visualization dashboards.