Is it allowed to connect multiple Kibana but all with exact same versions to the same elastic cluster

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

I tried to connect a second Kibana to a running elastic search cluster. The elastic cluster originally already has a Kibana connected to it. There were some users created through the first Kibana UI, and those users were assigned custom role. I was able to log in to the first Kibana with those user credentials.

After the second Kibana is connected to the elastic cluster, I was no longer able to log in to both Kibana UIs using those user credential. I saw error

|error|"Internal Server Error"|
|message|"Multiple versions of Kibana are running against the same Elasticsearch cluster, unable to authorize user."|

Question: If all Kibana are exactly the same version, is it allowed to have two or more Kibana all connect to the same elastic search cluster?

2

We have a dedicated section in the Kibana documentation.

It can be done to provide "High Availability"
In general, you need:

  • Same Kibana version
  • Same Kibana settings in kibana.yml except eventually the ones to connect to Elasticsearch or the server.name
  • Same value for xpack.security.encryptionKey across all instances (used to encrypt cookies)
  • Same value for xpack.reporting.encryptionKey across all instances (used to encrypt reports)

If you want instead to create "multiple tenants", then there are other settings to configure in order to make the 2 Kibana instances totally independent.
To implement this without using multiple Kibana instances, you can use Kibana Spaces.