Counting number of documents using Elasticsearch

Question

If one wants to count the number of documents in an index (of Elasticsearch) then there are (at least?) two possibilities:

• Direct count

Answer 1

curl http://localhost:9200/_cat/indices?v provides you the count and other information in a tabular format

health status index                              uuid                   pri rep docs.count docs.deleted store.size pri.store.size
yellow open   logstash-2019.10.09-000001         IS7HBUgRRzO7Rn1puBFUIQ   1   1          0            0       283b           283b
green  open   .kibana_task_manager_1             e4zZcF9wSQGFHB_lzTszrg   1   0          2            0     12.5kb         12.5kb
yellow open   metricbeat-7.4.0-2019.10.09-000001 h_CWzZHcRsakxgyC36-HTg   1   1       6118            0      2.2mb          2.2mb
green  open   .apm-agent-configuration           J6wkUr2CQAC5kF8-eX30jw   1   0          0            0       283b           283b
green  open   .kibana_2                          W2ZETPygS8a83-Xcd6t44Q   1   0       1836           23      1.1mb          1.1mb
green  open   .kibana_1                          IrBlKqO0Swa6_HnVRYEwkQ   1   0          8            0    208.8kb        208.8kb
yellow open   filebeat-7.4.0-2019.10.09-000001   xSd2JdwVR1C9Ahz2SQV9NA   1   1          0            0       283b           283b
green  open   .tasks                             0ZzzrOq0RguMhyIbYH_JKw   1   0          1            0      6.3kb          6.3kb