Export Timelion Sheets for future use

[stevedearl (Steve Earl)]

Hi All,

I was trying to figure out how to do this and the following post from Lou on May 2016 seemed to provide a solution:

Timelion sheets exports for reuse on another Kibana instance

Hello, everything is in the title I have some saved sheets in my Kibana instance, and would like to find a way to take them (where are them saved ??) and put them in another Kibana installation on another PC... Your ideas/suggestions are very welcome. Have a great day.

However, like pavithrakc who posted a reply, this solution doesn't seem to work for me.

Can anyone suggest the best way to export/import Timelion charts.

For information, I have the following Timelion charts:

If I try to use the console as described in the post above to retrieve one of these sheets, it doesn't work:

Command:
GET .kibana/timelion-sheet/tlion_esb_ins_AFB_MaxProcessing_CreateOffer

Result:

All help appreciated.

Steve

[LeeDr (Lee Drengenberg)]

Hi Steve,

Kibana visualizations have changed to use a GUID id and no longer use the type parameter for different saved object types in 6.0+ versions. But you can still search on the title field

Try something like this;

GET .kibana/_search?q=title:tlion_esb_ins_AFB_MaxProcessing_CreateOffer

Regards,
Lee

[LeeDr (Lee Drengenberg)]

I think there's another way (maybe easier).

When you save a Timelion sheet you get 2 choices;

If you save it as a Kibana Dashboard panel you can use the regular Saved Objects UI to export it;

I just saved the default .es(*) timelion expression and then exported it and got this;

[
  {
    "_id": "02576270-dab0-11e7-93ca-1907e1bfe028",
    "_type": "visualization",
    "_source": {
      "title": "Lee",
      "visState": "{\"type\":\"timelion\",\"title\":\"Lee\",\"params\":{\"expression\":\".es(*)\",\"interval\":\"auto\"}}",
      "uiStateJSON": "{}",
      "description": "",
      "version": 1,
      "kibanaSavedObjectMeta": {
        "searchSourceJSON": "{}"
      }
    }
  }
]

[stevedearl (Steve Earl)]

Hi Lee,

Thanks for the reply. I'll check out both your suggestions when I'm back in the office tomorrow, but either of them would help me out.

Cheers,
Steve

[stevedearl (Steve Earl)]

Hi Lee,

For some reason I couldn't get the CURL 'search' to retrieve me the document via the console:

However, saving the expression as a dashboard panel worked fine, and they then appear under the 'Visualizations' section of the Management/Saved Objects tab. This works, as it means all my searches, visualizations (including Timelion) and dashboards can be imported/exported in one go, and I can get back to the original tlion query by looking at the saved panel expression.

I guess if I had one final comment, it might be a good enhancement in the future if the "Save entire Timelion sheet" option in Timelion made the sheet available within the Saved Objects/Visualizations area too as at the moment it's a little confusing that you save it, but it would not be present on an export so would be lost if you then re-imported the objects into a new Kibana instance (as I did).

Thanks again for the rapid (and v. useful) advice,
Steve

[LeeDr (Lee Drengenberg)]

One thing that might be throwing you off on your search for the timelion saved object, is that the id of a saved object used to be the title of the saved object but with spaces replaced by underscores. If your title is actually tlion esb ins AFB MaxProcessing CreateOffer then you would use that in your search instead of the former id string with underscores.

I'll discuss with Timelion developers and see if it makes sense to add them as another object type to export. And if so, I'll file an issue to get it in the queue.