Your new cluster is running quickly and smoothly. Now let's make sure it stays that way. This guide covers the essential configurations and best practices that separate a working prototype from a production-ready deployment. We'll walk through some production-ready basics like backup coverage, usage monitoring, and index lifecycle planning.
Understand Your Backup Coverage
Bonsai automatically backs up your cluster. No configuration required.
- Frequency: Hourly snapshots
- Retention: 2 weeks
- Storage: Encrypted S3, multi-region
Custom snapshot SLAs available for Enterprise plans. Contact us for details.
Monitor Your Usage
Avoid surprise throttling by tracking usage against plan limits.
Key metrics to monitor
Shards
Watch for approaching plan limit or many small indices.
Consolidate indices or reduce shard count.
Storage
Watch for steady growth or nearing disk threshold.
Implement retention policy or upgrade plan.
Documents
Watch for unexpected spikes or duplicate records.
Review indexing logic; check for reindex loops.
Plan Your Index Lifecycle
Bonsai doesn't auto-delete old data, but provides tools to help you manage retention. Planning your index lifecycle helps control costs and maintain performance as your data grows. Read The Ideal Elasticsearch Index for comprehensive guidance on capacity planning and sharding strategies.
Index Trimmer for automated cleanup
The Trimmer feature automatically removes old indices matching a pattern when they exceed a size threshold. See the Trimming Old Data guide for detailed setup instructions with screenshots.
- Navigate to the Trimmer tab in your cluster dashboard
- Click Add Rule
- Set a prefix pattern (e.g.,
logs-) that matches your time-series indices - Set a size threshold. The oldest matching indices will be pruned when exceeded
- Enable the rule
For static indices
Primary shard count is immutable after creation. Plan for growth by choosing an appropriate sharding scheme upfront - our sharding guidelines can help you determine the right configuration.
