Product release

Kibana 5.0.0-beta1 released

By
Court Ewing

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Kibana 5.0.0-beta1.

I'm not ashamed to admit it - the Kibana team really knows how to beta. Those Elasticsearch nerds might have a monopoly on consistency, and those squares working on Beats might get their stuff installed on thousands of servers before you've finished reading this post, but Kibana is where the party is.

We're shipping so many features in this release, it's taken me three drafts of this blog post to try to whittle it down to highlights. And that doesn't even include the dozens of bug fixes that are baked right in.

Check it out. You won't be disappointed.

Hopefully we're preaching to the choir at this point, but become an Elastic Pioneer by opening a valid bug report and we'll send you free stuff.

IMPORTANT: This is beta software that will only work with Elasticsearch 5.0.0-beta1. Please test it, but do not use it in production. Upgrading 5.0.0-beta1 to any other version is not supported.

Time series data with Timelion

Timelion is a plugin no more. It's now a fully supported, first-class citizen of Kibana core. Analyze your time series data with style, or at least with a custom DSL that let's you do some really cool stuff. And don't forget to embed those bad boys in your dashboards.

Timelion visualizations

Set scripting language for scripted fields

You can now select which Elasticsearch scripting language you'd like to use in scripted fields in Kibana. It's so easy, it's painless. Sorry… that pun was bad. But seriously, you can and should use the new Painless scripting language.

Creating a scripted field with painless

Set position of visualization legends

Because you deserve better than being hamstrung by right-aligned legends. Release the creative beast within and make your dashboards stand out with the new and improved, slightly-more-options-than-before legend positioning feature.

Top-positioned legend on a visualization

Share exactly what you're looking at, or share a link directly to the saved object

We've revamped the Sharing UI so you can easily select between a URL to what you're seeing on the screen right now versus a link to the underlying saved object that will remain up to date over time. No more sending people links to stale data, unless that's the kind of thing you're in to.

Sharing UI

X-Pack Reporting

You've seen it for Kibana 4.6, and now you can get it in X-Pack 5.0. Go ahead and generate PDF reports of your visualizations and dashboards to your heart's content.

Saved workspaces in X-Pack Graph

Building awesome graphs takes time, effort, and sometimes a little bit of luck. Don't let that all go to waste - save your workspace and come back to it later.

Stop URL length errors once and for all

This one sits squarely in the gray area between feature and bug fix, but the underlying issue is pretty gnarly, so we might as well shout to the heavens about it. If you have non-trivial dashboards on Internet Explorer, then you probably have hit the URL length limit and have experienced the bottomless sadness that is Kibana falling apart before your eyes. Fix this once and for all by enabling the state:storeInSessionStorage setting in Advanced Settings under Management.

Note that when this setting is enabled, you must use the sharing UI when you want to link someone to something you're looking at rather than grabbing the URL directly from your browser. It's a trade off we want to get rid of, but for now we wanted to get this fix out to anyone that's being plagued by URL length limits in their browser.

The highlights of the non-highlights

Like I said before, there's just too darn much to highlight effectively in a single blog post. Here are some of the other features that don't get the full section treatment:

  • Logarithmic scaling for bar charts
  • Boolean field formatters
  • Metric descriptions in X-Pack Monitoring
  • Ability to show/hide system indices in X-Pack Monitoring
  • Basic auth support in Kibana X-Pack Security
  • Default session timeout for X-Pack Security is now the life of the browser
  • Template URL management in X-Pack Graph

All the bugs

We fixed dozens of bugs in 5.0.0-beta1. You read that right… dozens with a "d". Though I guess that makes sense since you can't spell "dozens" any other way.

  • Left nav icons no longer overlap on small screens #8196
  • Bind Kibana to localhost by default #8013
  • Skip empty lines during CSV upload #8029
  • Sign .deb packages with sha512 #8002
  • Improve scaling of tile map markers #8000
  • Remove unnecessary round trips to Elasticsearch in the vis editor #7960
  • And much, much, more!

Wrap up

Download the beta1 release and help us track down any last bugs. Issues can be filed on Github, feedback is appreciated on our forums, and feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or IRC as well.