---
title: Shard Too Small
description: Describes what AutoOps detects and surfaces with the Shard Too Small insight: The cluster holds many shards that are far smaller than the 10–50 GB range Elasticsearch guidance targets.
url: https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/autoops-insights/tree/main/elasticsearch/shard_too_small
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 Too Small
The cluster holds many shards that are far smaller than the 10–50 GB range Elasticsearch guidance targets. Too many tiny shards force the master to track excess metadata and make searches fan out across more shard copies than necessary.
<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     | Index                                           |
| Domains   | performance, index-management, shard-allocation |


## Customization settings

You can customize these settings to adjust when AutoOps detects this event and presents the insight. Refer to [AutoOps event settings](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/tree/main/deploy-manage/monitor/autoops/ec-autoops-event-settings) for details.
The default customization settings are:

| Setting                               | Type            | Default |
|---------------------------------------|-----------------|---------|
| Minimum optimal shard size in GB      | Integer         | 1       |
| Exclude indices based on this pattern | List of strings |         |
| Minimum indices size to match         | Integer         | 1       |


## 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.

### There are many small shards in the cluster


#### What was detected

Total number of indices with small shards: 12 The index that contains the smallest shard is: logs-prod-000045, and the shard size is: 0. See a sample list: `logs-prod-000045`, `logs-prod-000046`.

#### Recommendations

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

<dropdown title="Set up ILM policy">
  **Condition**: Always shown for this insight.For time-based index logs-prod-000045, create or update its ILM policy so rollovers use larger, better-sized shards.
</dropdown>

<dropdown title="Merge similar indices">
  **Condition**: Shown when for non-system indexes.Merge similar indices to reduce the number of small indices and improve cluster performance and stability.
</dropdown>

<dropdown title="Reduce shard count">
  **Condition**: Shown when for non-system indexes.Use the shrink API to reduce shard count from 24 to 12. See the [Shrink API](https://www.elastic.co/docs/api/doc/elasticsearch/operation/operation-indices-shrink) for prerequisites.
</dropdown>


#### Background and impact

Impact: many small shards can slow down searches and cause cluster instability.
Some indices have shards that are too small. An abundance of small shards can slow down search operations because results have to be collated from many shards.
It also puts an excessive strain on all nodes because of the resources required to maintain metadata on the state of all the shards.
Ideally, shard size should be between 10 and 50GB, and the number of shards on each data node is limited by default to 1,000. There’s also a limit of 1,024 shards per index.