Breaking changes in 5.0

This section discusses the changes that you need to be aware of when migrating your application to Kibana 5.0.

Details: The previous packages.elastic.co URL has been altered to artifacts.elastic.co.

Impact: Ensure you update your repository files before running the upgrade process, or your operating system may not see the new packages.

Pull Request 8013

Details: Kibana (like Elasticsearch) now binds to localhost for security purposes instead of 0.0.0.0 (all addresses). Previous binding to 0.0.0.0 also caused issues for Windows users.

Impact: If you are running Kibana inside a container/environment that does not allow localhost binding, this will cause Kibana not to start up unless server.host is configured in the kibana.yml to a valid IP address/host, etc..

Pull Request 7855

Details: As part of addressing the security issue ESA-2016-03 (CVE-2016-1000220) in the Kibana product, the markdown version has been bumped.

Impact: As a result of the fix to ESA-2016-03, there is a slight change in the markdown format for headers.

Previously, headers are defined using ### followed by the title:

###Packetbeat:
   [Dashboard](/#/dashboard/Packetbeat-Dashboard)
   [Web transactions](/#/dashboard/HTTP)

It should now be defined as follows (with a space between # and the title):

### Packetbeat:
    [Dashboard](/#/dashboard/Packetbeat-Dashboard)
    [Web transactions](/#/dashboard/HTTP)

Pull Request 7308

Details: To align with the Elasticsearch packages, Kibana now installs binaries under /usr/share/kibana and configuration files under /etc/kibana. Previously they were both located under /opt/kibana.

Impact: Apart from learning the new location of Kibana binaries and configuration files, you may have to update your automation scripts as needed.

Pull Request 6402

Details: The new installer can be found at /bin/kibana-plugin. When installing/removing Kibana plugins, you will now call kibana-plugin instead of the main kibana script.

Impact: You may have to update your automation scripts.

Pull Request 6896

Details: The only headers that are proxied from the browser client to Elasticsearch are the ones set via the elasticsearch.requestHeadersWhitelist server configuration.

Impact: If you’re relying on client headers in Elasticsearch, you will need to whitelist the specific headers in your kibana.yml.

Pull Request 6953

Details: The base path configuration now precedes the default route configuration when accessing the default route.

Impact: If you were relying on both defaultRoute and basePath configurations, you will need to remove the hardcoded basePath from your defaultRoute.

Pull Request 6764

Details: The server no longer renders a list of static files if you try to access a directory.

Impact: If you were relying on this behavior before, you will need to expose underlying directory listings via a reverse proxy instead.

Pull Request 8534

Details: All server logs now render in UTC rather than the server’s local time.

Impact: If you are parsing the timestamps of Kibana server logs in an automated way, make sure to update your automation to accomodate UTC values.

Pull Request 7827

Details: From the early days of Kibana, adding a standard deviation metric to a data table also resulted in an average column being added to that data table. This is no longer the case.

Impact: If you want to have both standard deviation and average in the same data table, then add both columns just as you would any other metric.

Pull Request 8339

Details: Elasticsearch has removed the ability to specify a size of 0 for terms aggregations, so Kibana’s minimum value has been adjusted to follow suit.

Impact: Any saved visualization that relies on size=0 will need to be updated.

Details: Loading a 4.x dashboard in Kibana 5.0 results in an internal change to the dashboard’s metadata, which you can persist by saving the dashboard.

Impact: This change will not affect the functionality of the dashboard itself, but you must save the dashboard before using certain features such as X-Pack reporting.

Details: Since Kibana 4.3, users have been able to arbitrarily modify filters via a generic JSON editor. If users took advantage of any deprecated Elasticsearch features in this way, then they will cause errors in Kibana since they’re removed from Elasticsearch 5.0. Check the Elasticsearch breaking changes documentation for more details.

Impact: Discover, Visualize, and Dashboard will error for any saved objects that are relying on removed Elasticsearch functionality. Users will need to update the JSON of any affected filters.