Missing aggregation

The missing aggregation creates a single bucket containing all documents that do not have a value for a specified field. A document is considered missing if the field is absent entirely or contains a configured NULL value. This aggregation is commonly paired with other bucket aggregations to account for documents that cannot be placed in any other bucket because they lack the required field.

Parameters

The missing aggregation takes the following parameters.

Example

The following example uses the products index (created in the weighted average example) which contains a document without the rating field. The aggregation counts how many products are missing a rating and includes a terms subaggregation to identify them:

GET /products/_search
{
  "size": 0,
  "aggs": {
    "without_rating": {
      "missing": {
        "field": "rating"
      },
      "aggs": {
        "names": {
          "terms": {
            "field": "name.keyword"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Example response

The response shows that one product (Product C) is missing the rating field:

{
  "took": 9,
  "timed_out": false,
  "terminated_early": true,
  "_shards": {
    "total": 1,
    "successful": 1,
    "skipped": 0,
    "failed": 0
  },
  "hits": {
    "total": {
      "value": 4,
      "relation": "eq"
    },
    "max_score": null,
    "hits": []
  },
  "aggregations": {
    "without_rating": {
      "doc_count": 1,
      "names": {
        "doc_count_error_upper_bound": 0,
        "sum_other_doc_count": 0,
        "buckets": [
          {
            "key": "Product C",
            "doc_count": 1
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

Response body fields

The following table lists the response body fields.