Capturing diagnostics

The Kibana Support Diagnostic tool captures a point-in-time snapshot of Kibana and its Task Manager health. It works on Kibana versions 7.11.0 and above.

You can use the information captured by the tool to troubleshoot problems with Kibana instances. Check the Troubleshooting Kibana Health blog for examples.

You can generate diagnostic information using this tool before you contact Elastic Support or Elastic Discuss to help get a timely answer.

Requirements

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Java Runtime Environment or Java Development Kit v1.8 or higher.

Access the tool

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The Support Diagnostic tool is included out-of-the-box as a sub-library in:

Elastic Cloud Enterprise - Find the tool under Elastic Cloud Enterprise > Deployment > Operations > Prepare Bundle > Kibana.
Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes - Run the tool with eck-diagnostics.

You can also get the latest version of the tool by downloading the diagnostics-X.X.X-dist.zip file from the support-diagnostic repo.

Capture diagnostic information

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To run a Kibana diagnostic:

In a terminal, verify that your network and user permissions are sufficient to connect by polling Kibana’s Task Manager health.

For example, with the parameters host:localhost, port:5601, and username:elastic, you’d use the following curl request. Adapt these parameters to your context.
```
curl -X GET -k -H 'kbn-xsrf: true' -u elastic -p https://localhost:5601/api/task_manager/_health
```
If you receive an HTTP 200 OK response, you can proceed to the next step. If you receive a different response code, you must diagnose the issue before proceeding.
Using the same environment parameters, run the diagnostic tool script.

For information about the parameters that you can pass to the tool, refer to the diagnostic parameter reference.

The following command options are recommended:

Unix-based systems
```
sudo ./diagnostics.sh --type kibana-local --host localhost --port 5601 -u elastic -p --bypassDiagVerify --ssl --noVerify
```
Windows
```
sudo .\diagnostics.bat --type kibana-local --host localhost --port 5601 -u elastic -p --bypassDiagVerify --ssl --noVerify
```
Script execution modes

You can execute the script in three modes:
- kibana-local (default, recommended): Polls the Kibana API, gathers operating system info, and captures cluster and garbage collection (GC) logs.
- kibana-remote: Establishes an SSH session to the applicable target server to pull the same information as kibana-local.
- kibana-api: Polls the Kibana API. All other data must be collected manually.
When the script has completed, verify that no errors were logged to diagnostic.log. If the log file contains errors, refer to Diagnose errors in diagnostic.log.
If the script completed without errors, an archive with the format <diagnostic type>-diagnostics-<DateTimeStamp>.zip is created in the working directory or the output directory that you have specified. You can review or share the diagnostic archive as needed.

Diagnose a non-200 response

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When you poll your Task Manager health, if you receive any response other than 200 0K, then the diagnostic tool might not work as intended. Check the possible resolutions based on the error code that you get:

HTTP 401 UNAUTHENTICATED: Additional information in the error will usually indicate that your username:password pair is invalid, or that your Elasticsearch .security index is unavailable and you need to setup a temporary Elasticsearch file-based realm user with role:superuser to authenticate.
HTTP 403 UNAUTHORIZED: Your username is recognized but has insufficient permissions to run the diagnostic. Either use a different username or increase the user’s privileges.
HTTP 429 TOO_MANY_REQUESTS (for example, circuit_breaking_exception): The authentication and authorization were successful, but the Elasticsearch cluster isn’t responding to requests. This issue is usually intermittent and can happen when the cluster is overwhelmed. In this case, resolve Elasticsearch’s health first before returning to Kibana.
HTTP 504 BAD_GATEWAY: Your network has trouble reaching Kibana. You might be using a proxy or firewall. Consider running the diagnostic tool from a different location, confirming your port, or using an IP instead of a URL domain.

Diagnose errors in `diagnostic.log`

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The following are common errors that you might encounter when running the diagnostic tool:

Error: Could not find or load main class com.elastic.support.diagnostics.DiagnosticApp

This indicates that you accidentally downloaded the source code file instead of diagnostics-X.X.X-dist.zip from the releases page.
A security_exception that includes is unauthorized for user:

The provided user has insufficient admin permissions to run the diagnostic tool. Use another user, or grant the user role:superuser privileges.
{kib} Server is not Ready yet

This indicates issues with Kibana’s dependencies blocking full start-up. To investigate, check Troubleshoot Kibana UI error.

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Capturing diagnostics