Grid layout sizing changed after upgrade from 6.2.4 to 6.7.1

[jmcclure (James McClure)]

I have upgraded Kibana from 6.2.4 to 6.7.1 and find that dashboard layouts have changed (a squished visualization). As I understand it, the Kibana grid is now more fine grained than before.

Other than go through the exercise of performing a visual re-layout of all the dashboards that I have implemented, is there a rule-of-thumb on the grid sizing that I can apply to migrate the dashboard "gridData" configuration.

Thanks,
James

[bhavyarm]

I am pretty sure we don't have an easy way of doing that. @timroes any inputs?

Thanks,
Bhavya

[timroes]

Hi James,

thanks for your question. The grid itself was extended from 12 columns to 48 (see also this commit).

Actually there is code in Kibana that should have updated your dashboard when upgrading Kibana (https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/master/src/legacy/core_plugins/kibana/public/dashboard/panel/panel_utils.ts#L74). Do you have any idea why this could potentially not have ran? Did you somehow manually manipulate the saved objects during upgrading?

Cheers,
Tim

[jmcclure (James McClure)]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the information. I'm pretty sure it was how I performed the 'upgrade'; not allowing that panel utility to kick-in.

I keep exported dashboards in Git. With an editor I did a global replace on "version": "6.2.4" to "version": "6.7.1" and then reimported the modified dashboard files using curl ( /api/kibana/dashboards/import?force=true ).

Will try again without modifying the dashboard content version.

Thanks,
James

[timroes]

Hi,

yeap that would be it I would in general not recommend messing up with version numbers in the saved objects. Besides some specific (older) migration systems like that for dashboard, we also have in more up-to-date versions of Kibana a general migration system in place for upgrading saved objects (that would also run when importing via API, or when just starting up a newer version on an old index, etc.) which will perform migrations of those saved objects. By messing up those numbers you might actually prevent that system from working correctly and end up with broken saved objects (in some places it might be as obvious as that, in other places it might be really subtle and can cause just later on larger confusion, e.g. because minor things in a chart changed that you didn't catch exactly).

Cheers,
Tim

[jmcclure (James McClure)]

Just following up to complete what I have done...

Loaded the dashboards unchanged (which were created for a 6.2.4 version of Kibana ) into Kibana 6.7.1, using curl to the API /api/kibana/dashboards/import?force=true. The dashboard layouts are correct; looks like the panel utility took care of the grid updates.

I exported those dashboards from Kibana 6.7.1 and the version and grid data are the same as the import files (version and grid data remain unchanged with respect to the import files).

James