[updated]
Working with Elasticsearch is wonderful but it can be a challenge to lasso together a coherent set of tools with which to manage and interact with your cluster. There is no one “do-everything” utility that includes 100% of the Elasticsearch query, operations, and administrative API functionality. There are a few good tools and plugins that I use, however, that round out a complete toolbox for using Elasticsearch effectively.
Operations
elasticsearch-head
The Elasticsearch head plugin is written by Ben Birch and is one of the old stalwarts that nearly everyone has used at one point to help manage an Elasticsearch cluster. It has a nice basic overview of indexes and includes some rudimentary administrative functionality like creating index aliases, running optimize, and easily viewing read-only data and cluster health. I still use this plugin pretty regularly but it has since been superseded by some more modern interfaces. It also falls down a bit, interface-wise, if you have a lot of indices in your cluster. You can install elasticsearch-head as a plugin directly from the Elasticsearch plugin command.
