Connect to the Pulse Opensearch Cluster

Starting with Pulse v7.2.0, Pulse Explorer operates with the OpenSearch Security Plugin fully enabled. To comply with modern security standards, all access to Pulse Explorer is enforced through Pulse, which acts as a trusted gateway and applies certificate-based authentication.

As a result, the only supported way to connect to Pulse Explorer is by using the client certificates included with the Pulse installation. This ensures encrypted communication and establishes the foundation for future security enhancements requested by our clients.

When administrative access is required for data extraction, use the certificates located under:

<PULSE INSTALLATION PATH>/opensearch/opensearch-security/ssl/

Summary

Certificate-based authentication is mandatory for Pulse Explorer.
Certificates are provided with Pulse, these must be protected and stored securely.
This access method is intended strictly for administrative use.
This approach ensures Pulse Explorer aligns with enterprise security requirements while allowing controlled access when necessary.
Other Administrative tasks should be done using the dashboards console.

Example

The following examples assume that Pulse is installed under /opt/pulse and that OpenSearch is running on port 8097.

To extract data from the pulse-server-state-2025-12 index:

[ecarmona@CWSOFT03 my-explorer-extract-utils]$ curl "https://localhost:8097/pulse-server-state-2025-12/_search?pretty"   --cacert /opt/pulse/conf/opensearch/opensearch-security/ssl/pulse-os-ca.pem   --cert   /opt/pulse/conf/opensearch/opensearch-security/ssl/pulse-os-admin.pem   --key    /opt/pulse/conf/opensearch/opensearch-security/ssl/pulse-os-admin-pkcs8.key

Extracting data from the server state index filtering by DocumentType and setting only retrieving 2 documents

[ecarmona@CWSOFT03 my-explorer-extract-utils]$ curl "https://localhost:8097/pulse-server-state-2025-12/_search?pretty"   --cacert /opt/pulse/conf/opensearch/opensearch-security/ssl/pulse-os-ca.pem   --cert   /opt/pulse/conf/opensearch/opensearch-security/ssl/pulse-os-admin.pem   --key    /opt/pulse/conf/opensearch/opensearch-security/ssl/pulse-os-admin-pkcs8.key -H "x-forwarded-for: 127.0.0.1" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "size": 2,
    "query": {
      "term": {      
        "DocumentType": "Drive"
      }
    }
  }'

The response of the above request will be:

{
  "took" : 305,
  "timed_out" : false,
  "_shards" : {
    "total" : 1,
    "successful" : 1,
    "skipped" : 0,
    "failed" : 0
  },
  "hits" : {
    "total" : {
      "value" : 10000,
      "relation" : "gte"
    },
    "max_score" : 0.17817506,
    "hits" : [
      {
        "_index" : "pulse-server-state-2025-12",
        "_id" : "wlyRBZsB0Bojn45lsgdq",
        "_score" : 0.17817506,
        "_source" : {
          "timestamp" : "2025-12-10T11:03:13.082+11:00",
          "ServerName" : "CWLINUX",
          "DiskConsumption" : 58238.0,
          "DiskConsumed" : 43.10669,
          "DriveName" : "/",
          "DriveSize" : 135102.0,
          "DriveFreeSpace" : 76864.0,
          "DocumentType" : "Drive"
        }
      },
      {
        "_index" : "pulse-server-state-2025-12",
        "_id" : "w1yRBZsB0Bojn45lsgdq",
        "_score" : 0.17817506,
        "_source" : {
          "timestamp" : "2025-12-10T11:03:13.082+11:00",
          "ServerName" : "CWLINUX",
          "DiskConsumption" : 238860.0,
          "DiskConsumed" : 29.171959,
          "DriveName" : "/home",
          "DriveSize" : 818800.0,
          "DriveFreeSpace" : 579940.0,
          "DocumentType" : "Drive"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}