The cat APIs

This API helps us to print information nodes, indices, fields, tasks, and plugins in a human-readable format rather than a JSON. It can also be visualized to see how tables are printed on the console.

All these commands can be used with the GET verb of curl. By default, the commands will list only data and no headers. To print headers, we can use v in query parameters:

GET /_cat/health?v

The preceding command can be used instead of the following:

GET /_cat/health

We can also specify which headers to show by supplying the comma-separated values for the h query parameter.

Let's see the endpoints available to operate on:

• _cat/indices: This shows data about indices such as health, status, index name, primary, replicas, documents count, and memory:

          GET /_cat/indices?v&h=health,status,index,docs.count,store
  

Here is what it looks like in the Console:

As we can see, it shows health and stats for each index.

• _cat/master: This shows the node ID, IP address, and node name of...