[role="xpack"]
[testenv="platinum"]
[[ccr-auto-follow]]
=== Automatically following indices

In time series use cases where you want to follow new indices that are
periodically created (such as daily Beats indices), manually configuring follower
indices for each new leader index can be an operational burden. The auto-follow
functionality in {ccr} is aimed at easing this burden. With the auto-follow
functionality, you can specify that new indices in a remote cluster that have a 
name that matches a pattern are automatically followed.

==== Managing auto-follow patterns

You can add a new auto-follow pattern configuration with the
{ref}/ccr-put-auto-follow-pattern.html[create auto-follow pattern API].  When you create
a new auto-follow pattern configuration, you are configuring a collection of
patterns against a single remote cluster. Any time a new index with a name that 
matches one of the patterns in the collection is created in the remote cluster,
a follower index is configured in the local cluster. The follower index uses the 
new index as its leader index.

You can inspect all configured auto-follow pattern collections with the
{ref}/ccr-get-auto-follow-pattern.html[get auto-follow pattern API]. To delete a
configured auto-follow pattern collection, use the
{ref}/ccr-delete-auto-follow-pattern.html[delete auto-follow pattern API].

Since auto-follow functionality is handled automatically in the background on
your behalf, error reporting is done through logs on the elected master node
and through the {ref}/ccr-get-stats.html[{ccr} stats API].
