Executing a geotile grid aggregation

Using Elasticsearch to show data on maps is a very common pattern between Elasticsearch users. One of the most commonly used map formats is the tile one, in which a map is split into several small square parts and when the render of a location is required, the tiles near the location are fetched by a server.

Apart from commercial solutions, OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstreetmap.org/) maps are the most used, and a lot of Kibana maps are based on their tile servers. OpenStreetMap is open source and you can easily provide your own tile server via a Docker (https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/using-a-docker-container/).

The geotile grid aggregation allows to return buckets of documents with geopoints or geoshapes in the standard map tile format used for cells “{zoom}/{x}/{y}”.

Getting ready

You need an up and running Elasticsearch installation, as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter...