limits on "action.summary.index" vs piping to "collect"

[gkanapathy]

I've found that if I have a summarizing search using "stats" and I schedule it via the UI and use the "enable summary indexing" checkbox (or equivalently, use the "action.summary_index" setting in savedsearches.conf), then my summary is limited 10,000 results. (Presumably because that's all that is getting passed from the search to the implicit "summary_index" command.) However, if I take the same search, don't use the checkbox, and instead modify my search and append "| collect addtime=true index=summary" to it, this limit does not exist (or at least is set much higher).

Is this a bug, or intended? It's nice to have the workaround when I need more than 10,000 results in a summary, but there's not documentation or setting I can find that affects the checkbox/"action.summary_index".

[Stephen_Sorkin · Accepted solution]

This is a limitation in the alert actions system which invokes the "collect" command. In an upcoming maintenance release (likely 4.1.4), the default for summary indexing will be to automatically inline the "collect" command to eliminate this limit.

Until then, if each run of summarization yields more than 10k results, your best bet is to "| collect" in your scheduled search itself.