Kibana displays Unix default date

I have uploaded some logs using logstash where I have read the @timestamp field from the logs timestamp using the date filter. I needed to make a histogram based on the hour of the day for all days (i.e. to have values from 0 to 23 on the x-axis and have the sum on all days on the y-axis). Therefore, I created a new field in the grok filter which reads the hour, minute and seconds from the timestamp and saves it in a seperate field called "time".

Before parsing the logs with logstash I used the following query to setup an index in ES and configure the field as a field of type date:
curl -XPUT http://localhost:9200/indexname -d '
{
"mappings" : {
"default" : {
"properties" : {
"time" : {"type": "date", "format" : "HH:mm:ss.SSS" },
}
}
}
}
';

Now when visualizing the results in Kibana using a date histogram, everything works as expected. Except that it gives the default date, which is 1-1-1970 beside the hour, since the field "time" has no date. Is there anyway to stop this so that I have on the x-axis only the hours from 0 to 23?
I have used a workaround which is to read the hours only and to save them as integers. This has the drawback that the histogram can have a precision of one hour only (which in the other case would be up to 1 millisecond).
Kibana version is 4.5.1.

It doesn't seem to be supported, my original thought was to use field formatters but the date histogram seems to use its own formatting. There's an issue filed at https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/5069.

If you're using a date range aggregation field formatters will work:

. You can get to this screen by clicking on the icon in the controls column from the index pattern page for your index.

1 Like

Thanks for the answer! I have tried to change the format of the field as you suggested and in the date histogram I still see the same old format with month and year as you have pointed out. The problem is that I cannot use a normal histogram because this is a field of type "date" so if I choose the normal histogram I cannot find it in the drop down menu which only shows numeric fields (integers, floating points, ...etc.).