Briefly, this error occurs when Elasticsearch is unable to access or read the content of the gateway, which is crucial for data storage and retrieval. This could be due to incorrect permissions, network issues, or a faulty gateway. To resolve this, you can check and correct the permissions, ensure the network connectivity is stable, or troubleshoot the gateway for any issues. If the gateway is corrupted, you may need to restore it from a backup.
This guide will help you check for common problems that cause the log ” Failed to list content of gateway ” to appear. To understand the issues related to this log, read the explanation below about the following Elasticsearch concepts: repositories, blobstore.
Overview
An Elasticsearch snapshot provides a backup mechanism that takes the current state and data in the cluster and saves it to a repository (read snapshot for more information). The backup process requires a repository to be created first. The repository needs to be registered using the _snapshot endpoint, and multiple repositories can be created per cluster. The following repository types are supported:
Repository types
| Repository type | Configuration type |
|---|---|
| Shared file system | Type: “fs” |
| S3 | Type : “s3” |
| HDFS | Type :“hdfs” |
| Azure | Type: “azure” |
| Google Cloud Storage | Type : “gcs” |
Examples
To register an “fs” repository:
PUT _snapshot/my_repo_01
{
"type": "fs",
"settings": {
"location": "/mnt/my_repo_dir"
}
}Notes and good things to know
- S3, HDFS, Azure and Google Cloud require a relevant plugin to be installed before it can be used for a snapshot.
- The setting, path.repo: /mnt/my_repo_dir needs to be added to elasticsearch.yml on all the nodes if you are planning to use the repo type of file system. Otherwise, it will fail.
- When using remote repositories, the network bandwidth and repository storage throughput should be high enough to complete the snapshot operations normally, otherwise you will end up with partial snapshots.
Log Context
Log “Failed to list content of gateway” class name is BlobStoreRepository.java. We extracted the following from Elasticsearch source code for those seeking an in-depth context :
public void delete() {
final Map blobs;
try {
blobs = blobContainer.listBlobs();
} catch (IOException e) {
throw new IndexShardSnapshotException(shardId; "Failed to list content of gateway"; e);
} Tuple tuple = buildBlobStoreIndexShardSnapshots(blobs);
BlobStoreIndexShardSnapshots snapshots = tuple.v1();
int fileListGeneration = tuple.v2();
