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Find a Shard Key

Every shared collection has a shard key. To display the shard key, connect to a mongos instance and run the db.printShardingStatus() method:

db.printShardingStatus()

The output resembles:

<dbname>.<collection>
shard key: { <shard key> : <1 or hashed> }
unique: <boolean>
balancing: <boolean>
chunks:
<shard name1> <number of chunks>
<shard name2> <number of chunks>
...
{ <shard key>: <min range1> } -->> { <shard key> : <max range1> } on : <shard name> <last modified timestamp>
{ <shard key>: <min range2> } -->> { <shard key> : <max range2> } on : <shard name> <last modified timestamp>
...
tag: <tag1> { <shard key> : <min range1> } -->> { <shard key> : <max range1> }
...

For more details on the db.printShardingStatus() output, see the sharded collection section on the sh.status() page.

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