Hi, I was running my dev environment on Elasticsearch 5.2 and Kibana 5.2, but since I upgraded to 5.3 I'm having all kind of mixed problems due to x-pack being default on ES 5.3, right now I can't connect kibana to ES and some posts suggest it's because I don't have a license for x-pack, is it needed now?
You don't need one, no. You can disable that in the config or just uninstall the plugin.