Kibana doesn't display anything until all elasticsearch replica shards are allocated

We have 3 elasticsearch nodes in the cluster, 2 data nodes and 1 client node to which Kibana talks to. When one of the data node dies, kibana's discover page displays "no results found". It's not until both data nodes are healthy that Kibana starts to display logs again.
I though replica shards are HA features and kibana should be able to talk to elasticsearch cluster with only 1 data node. What am I missing here?

That shouldn't happen, even in a red state your data should be readable.

What version are you on?

We are on 4.1.1.
We just had a discussion about this and we suspect that elasticsearch cluster must have a green status for kibana to work properly. Whenever one of our data nodes are down the cluster status turns yellow because there's not replicas, I wonder if kibana have this limitation in term of talking to elasticsearch cluster with a minimum number of data nodes.

Thanks!

Even if your cluster is red you can still read data.

Hmm that's not the behaviour we see. Would it help if I did a screen cap turning off one of the clusters and then showing kibana not working? Thanks.

What versions are you on?

Logstash 1.5.1
ElasticSearch 1.6.0
Kibana 4.1.1