: So, is Overseer really only an "implementation detail" or something that Solr : Ops guys need to be very aware of?
Most people don't ever need to worry about the overseer - it's magic and it will take care of itself. The recent work on adding support for an "overseer role" in 4.7 was specifically for people who *want* to worry about it. I've updated several places in the solr ref guide to remove some missleading claims about hte overseer (some old docs equated it to running embedded zookeeper) and add some more info to the glossary.. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Solr+Glossary#SolrGlossary-Overseer https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Collections+API#CollectionsAPI-api15AddRole -Hoss http://www.lucidworks.com/
