Best Practices: Index Naming Convention

When naming your index or indices, it is important to choose meaningful, easy-to-understand, and simple names. So how do you pick?

To start, there are some things that are not allowed:

1. Capital letters

2. Symbols other than - or _

3. Spaces

4. Starting the index name with - or _

Index naming conventions can change depending on your use case. In general, a good practice is to use your organization's name as the root of the index name, here are some considerations for naming conventions:

1. Department

2. Team

3. Use-case

4. Experiment name

5. Process name

Here are some example index names:

• acme

• acme-finance

• acme-2021

• acme_dev

• acme_prod

• acme-duplicates

• acme-duplicates_april-22-2020

Index names can also be aggregated for crawling operations and visualizations! This allows you to, at the surface, combine indices that share naming conventions. This can be very powerful for splitting up data by department, location, etc. while still being able to search and action from multiple levels above.

Aggregate indices use wildcards * or comma-separated list to combine multiple indices into one, while still being able to have the flexibility of multiple indices