---
title: Shard rebalancing restricted
description: Describes what AutoOps detects and surfaces with the Shard rebalancing restricted insight: Shard rebalancing is turned off or restricted, so the cluster cannot move shards off overloaded disks or onto newly added nodes within your allocation rules.
url: https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/autoops-insights/tree/main/elasticsearch/shard_rebalancing_restricted
products:
  - Elastic Cloud Enterprise
  - Elastic Cloud Hosted
  - Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes
  - Elasticsearch
applies_to:
  - Elastic Cloud Hosted: Generally available
  - Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes: Generally available
  - Elastic Cloud Enterprise: Generally available
  - Self-managed Elastic deployments: Generally available
---

# Shard rebalancing restricted
Shard rebalancing is turned off or restricted, so the cluster cannot move shards off overloaded disks or onto newly added nodes within your allocation rules. Disk and CPU skew can persist until hot nodes saturate while others stay underused.
<note>
  For a complete list of insights, refer to [AutoOps insights](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/autoops-insights/tree/main/elasticsearch).
</note>


## Insight details


| Field     | Value                                        |
|-----------|----------------------------------------------|
| Component | Elasticsearch                                |
| Severity  | Medium                                       |
| Scope     | Cluster                                      |
| Domains   | performance, configuration, shard-allocation |


## Example: What you might see in AutoOps

The following is an example of what you might see when this insight is triggered. Real insights use live data and links from your deployment or cluster.

### Shard rebalancing is not fully enabled


#### What was detected

`cluster.routing.rebalance.enable` is not set to `all`. Shard rebalancing is turned off or limited.

#### Recommendations

<note>
  AutoOps shows different recommendations depending on how their conditions match your deployment or cluster.
</note>

<dropdown title="Enable shard rebalance">
  **Condition**: Always shown for this insight.Reset `cluster.routing.rebalance.enable` so primary and replica shards can rebalance across nodes.
  ```json

  {
    "transient": {
      "cluster.routing.rebalance.enable": null
    },
    "persistent": {
      "cluster.routing.rebalance.enable": null
    }
  }
  ```

  <note>
    Requires the `manage cluster` privilege. Requires Elasticsearch 8.0.0 or later. This action changes cluster or index configuration.
  </note>
</dropdown>


#### Background and impact

Shard rebalancing is how the master moves shards to improve balance across data nodes, for example from high disk utilization to lower utilization, or onto a newly added node.
Operators sometimes turn off rebalancing during maintenance. While it stays off, the cluster cannot correct skew from growth, node addition, or uneven indexing. Overloaded nodes keep more load than they should.
Re-enable rebalancing (`all`) when maintenance is done so the master can optimize placement within your allocation filters and disk watermarks.