elasticsearch/docs/reference/troubleshooting/data/increase-cluster-shard-limit.asciidoc

[[increase-cluster-shard-limit]]
== Total number of shards per node has been reached

Elasticsearch tries to take advantage of all the available resources by 
distributing data (index shards) amongst the cluster nodes.

Users might want to influence this data distribution by configuring the 
<<cluster-total-shards-per-node,`cluster.routing.allocation.total_shards_per_node`>>
system setting to restrict the number of shards that can be hosted on a single
node in the system, regardless of the index.
Various configurations limiting how many shards can be hosted on a single node 
can lead to shards being unassigned due to the cluster not having enough nodes to
satisfy the configuration.

In order to fix this follow the next steps:

include::{es-ref-dir}/tab-widgets/troubleshooting/data/increase-cluster-shard-limit-widget.asciidoc[]