The Elasticsearch cat API

Think of the Elasticsearch cat API as a simpler version of the Elasticsearch Cluster and Indices APIs mentioned earlier. The cat API returns results in an easy-to-read, tab-separated format, unlike the JSON returned by the Cluster and Indices APIs.

A complete list of API methods is available at https://www.elastic.co/blog/introducing-cat-api, but there are some highlights, which we cover in the following sections.

Background

Elasticsearch-head and Bigdesk are, for the most part, powered by the Elasticsearch APIs:

• Cluster API: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.7/cluster.html.
• Indices API: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.7/indices.html.

These two APIs provide a plethora of information about the inner workings of Elasticsearch. However, they also return large JSON documents that are complicated to interpret quickly. For example, here's a snippet from calling the Indices Stats API:

curl -XGET "http://elasticsearch...