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amazon-opensearch-service skill - Amazon OpenSearch Service
CapabilitiesHow the agent gets the skillUsing the skill with and without the AWS MCP ServerPrerequisitesSecurity considerations

amazon-opensearch-service skill

amazon-opensearch-service is a skill in the Agent Toolkit for AWS that brings Amazon OpenSearch Service expertise directly into your AI coding agent. A skill is a curated package of instructions, scripts, and reference material that helps an agent complete a task correctly – encapsulating domain knowledge and best practices the model would not otherwise have. The agent loads the skill only when your request is about OpenSearch, so it adds capability without slowing the agent down on unrelated work.

The skill works with managed OpenSearch Service domains and OpenSearch Serverless collections.

Capabilities

The skill routes each request to one of five capabilities.

Migration

Plan a migration from Solr, Elasticsearch, or self-managed OpenSearch into Amazon OpenSearch Service or Serverless. The skill assesses compatibility, translates schemas and queries, recommends instance class, count, and shard math, and outlines a cutover approach.

Assess my Solr 8 catalog for migration to OpenSearch Service
Note

The skill plans the migration; it does not move data. Use Migration Assistant for Amazon OpenSearch Service for historical backfill and live cutover.

Operations

Provision and manage domains and collections – lifecycle, version upgrades, storage tiers (including UltraWarm and OR1), fine-grained access control, and monitoring.

Provision a production OpenSearch Service domain with three Availability Zones

Build keyword (BM25), vector, semantic, hybrid, and RAG search. The skill helps with index configuration, k-NN engine selection (FAISS HNSW vs. Lucene), and Amazon Bedrock connectors for embeddings, and includes query DSL examples.

Build a hybrid search application with OpenSearch and Bedrock embeddings

Log analytics

Search and analyze logs with Piped Processing Language (PPL), set up OpenSearch Ingestion pipelines, detect anomalies, and build OpenSearch Dashboards.

Investigate why my service is returning 500s and correlate with recent traces

Trace analytics

Investigate distributed traces with OpenTelemetry – identify slow and error spans, build service maps, and ingest spans with Data Prepper.

Which service is causing the p99 latency regression in the checkout flow?

How the agent gets the skill

The skill is delivered through the Agent Toolkit for AWS. You have two options:

  • Install the aws-data-analytics plugin (recommended). The plugin bundles the AWS MCP Server configuration and the OpenSearch skill in a single install.

  • Discover it at runtime through the AWS MCP Server. With the AWS MCP Server configured, your agent finds the skill on demand using the server's search_documentation tool and loads it with retrieve_skill – no local install required.

Using the skill with and without the AWS MCP Server

The skill is designed to run with the Set up the AWS MCP Server, which provides authenticated API access, sandboxed script execution, and enterprise controls. Where the AWS MCP Server is available, the agent uses its call_aws tool to run OpenSearch operations.

The skill also works without the AWS MCP Server. Every operation in the skill runs with the standard AWS CLI alone (for example, aws opensearch describe-domain or aws opensearchserverless create-collection). The skill includes instructions that work with both approaches.

Prerequisites

Security considerations

When the agent runs OpenSearch operations, it acts with the credentials you provide. Anything those credentials are authorized to do, the agent can trigger on your behalf.

  • Use least-privilege credentials scoped to the indexes and actions the agent needs. Avoid reusing administrator credentials.

  • Separate development and production. Point the agent at non-production resources for exploration, and require explicit confirmation before production changes.

  • Review resources the agent creates before committing to long-lived infrastructure. The Operations and Migration capabilities can provision domains, collections, IAM roles, and networking resources.

  • Review tool output. MCP tool responses are returned to the language model as context. Avoid running operations against indexes that contain sensitive data you do not want exposed to your model provider.