ElasticStack 5.6.12 Upgrade

We are currently running a cluster of 3 Elasticsearch instances on Windows together with Kibana on a single instance and 2 logstash instances.

  • All Components are running 5.6.12
  • We do not use x-pack
  • All data ingestion is via a single Elastic instance using logstash elastic output

I want to upgrade the cluster to 6.5 in a single step. I know i have one incompatibility as the .kibana index was created in elastic 2.0 so it will need upgrading.
Based on what i read X-Pack required 5.6.14 and i want to avoid installing this just to use the upgrade assistant given that its bundled with elastic 6.3 and beyond. I also want to avoid multiple restarts.

Looking at the 6.0 upgrade documentation the kibana index needs updating to version 6 format anyway, so is it possible to do this in a single step from version 2 to 6 based on these instructions?
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/migrating-6.0-index.html

Will kibana continue to run correctly on version 5.6 after doing this, as i want to stage this in advance of performing the cluster upgrade.

When performing a rolling upgrade of the cluster is it advised to shutdown the logstash instances for the duration, or can they continue to feed data into elastic without issue during the upgrade? (I know i need to update the output plugin config to target more than a single elastic node)

Are there any other things i need to be aware of?

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