Using the _cat API is great for console based, adhoc queries of your cluster. To get even more detailed info on the health and performance of your cluster, or for programmatic access, the _cluster and _nodes endpoints may be your new best friends. There is a tremendous amount of information available about your elasticsearch cluster via these APIs. This lesson doesn’t cover all of them exhaustively, but instead introduces you to the endpoints and the data returned, arming you with the skills you need to go deeper as needed using the Elasticsearch docs found here.