[role="xpack"]
[[config-monitoring-indices]]
== Configuring indices for monitoring

<<indices-templates-v1,Index templates>> are used to configure the indices
that store the monitoring data collected from a cluster.

You can retrieve the templates through the `_template` API:

[source,console]
----------------------------------
GET /_index_template/.monitoring-es-mb*
----------------------------------

By default, the template configures one shard and one replica for the
monitoring indices. To override the default settings, add your own template:

. Set `index_patterns` to match existing `.monitoring-{product}-8-*` indices.
. Set the template `priority` to `1`. This ensures your template is
applied after the default template, which has an priority of 0.
. Specify the `number_of_shards` and/or `number_of_replicas` in the `settings`
section.

For example, the following template increases the number of shards to five
and the number of replicas to two.

[source,console]
----------------------------------
PUT /_index_template/custom_monitoring
{
  "index_patterns": [
  ".monitoring-beats-8-*",
  ".monitoring-es-8-*",
  ".monitoring-kibana-8-*",
  ".monitoring-logstash-8-*"
  ],
  "priority": 1,
  "template": {
    "settings": {
      "number_of_shards": 5,
      "number_of_replicas": 2
    }
  } 
}
----------------------------------

//////////////////////////

[source,console]
--------------------------------------------------
DELETE /_index_template/custom_monitoring
--------------------------------------------------
// TEST[continued]

//////////////////////////

IMPORTANT: Only set the `number_of_shards` and `number_of_replicas` in the
settings section. Overriding other monitoring template settings could cause
your monitoring dashboards to stop working correctly.