Exporting objects from Kibana for use in other ELK stacks?

[lucasjkr (Lucas Krupinski)]

i know the beats can export their templates to JSON files so we can CURL them into Elasticsearch without exposing that server directly to the rest of the network, but it doesn't seem like that's the case for dashboards, visualizations, etc - for that, the Beats client appears to need to talk directly to Elasticsearch, right?

But in Kibana, you can export all of those from the Management interface; I'm looking at an export right now, but I'm seeing a lot of UUID's, which is making me think that exporting dashboards from one Kibana instance and importing into a different Kibana instance attached to a different Elasticsearch instance might not be a good idea.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

As a test, I:

• spun up the servers
• setup the indexes and dashboards
• Exported everything from Kibana to a JSON file
• stopped the servers, pruned everything (images, containers, volumes)
• spun up brand new instances
• imported that JSON file back into the new Kibana instance.

A cursory glance says this seems to work, but I've hardly done any testing.

Anyone have ideas?

Basically, I want to script installation of everything into Kibana, rather than having to send the setups in through Beats.

[bhavyarm]

Hi,

I work in QA team of Kibana and we keep testing this feature in every release
This should work ok as long as you either associate saved objects with your current index patterns. Kibana guides you through this.

Another trick is to add a custom index pattern id when you are creating your current index patterns. The id should match the index pattern ids of your saved objects in your json.
You do it in the second step of index pattern creation.

Thanks,
Bhavya

[lucasjkr (Lucas Krupinski)]

Thank you! I skipped right past the customer index pattern ID (didn't know what it was, didn't want to touch it!). I'll work with that and chime up again if I run into anything!