Mapping an IP field

ElasticSearch is used to collect and search logs in a lot of systems, such as Kibana (http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/kibana/ or http://kibana.org/) and logstash (http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/logstash/ or http://logstash.net/). To improve searching in these scenarios, it provides the IPv4 type that can be used to store IP addresses in an optimized way.

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch cluster.

How to do it...

You need to define the type of the field that contains an IP address as "ip".

Using the preceding order example, you can extend it by adding the customer IP:

  "customer_ip": {
    "type": "ip",
    "store": "yes"
  }

The IP must be in the standard point notation form, as shown in the following code:

"customer_ip":"19.18.200.201"

How it works...

When ElasticSearch is processing a document, if a field is an IP one, it tries to convert its value to a numerical form and generate tokens for fast value searching.

The IP has special properties:

• index...