Nearly All Indices UNASSIGNED and All Are Red

[tlundste]

I am trying to repair an Elasticsearch / Logstash / Kibana (ELK) installation implemented by a former coworker. The system seemed to be running along fine until it ran out of space (several times now). I have successfully re-worked various .yml and/or config files to the point where I can now use curl from another system to take action. I have successfully deleted the oldest date of the logstash indices. So, I'm confident I can take action on the installation, if only I knew what I was doing! :)

So...
curl 'http://hostname:9200/_cat/shards?pretty' will list 500+ lines of shards (indices?). All but four of them are "UNASSIGNED", and the other four are INITIALIZING, and never change.
curl 'http://hostname:9200/_cat/indices?pretty' lists every entry as "red open logstash-yyyy.mm.dd" and then two numbers after that.

I'm too new at this to know what's going on, or the correct action to take. As I said, I successfully deleted one of the logstash dates... good or bad, I did it.

The Kibana browser page shows status red, and gives some stats, and indicates the indexes are initializing, try again in 2.5 seconds.
What can I do to get this thing back to functioning, again?
Would running out of disk space (and I mean, zero bytes free) cause the symptoms I am seeing?

[markwalkom]

Please join us at https://discuss.elastic.co/ or at #kibana on Freenode for troubleshooting help or general questions. (But yes, a full disk could cause this, you may need to delete some more indices or add more disk.)

We reserve Github for confirmed bugs and feature requests :)