Kibana index ID now references an id and not a

[conmurray (Conor Murray)]

Hi guys,
Im a GOLD licence and Ive raised this with my support engineer but I wanted to pop it here aswell for context.

I've a production environment running on 5.2.
I've recently being updating/upgrading our Dev environment to the latest 6.2 in order to understand the issues I might encounter along the way. There's been a few alright but one that affected my users was the following situation.

• User created a visualization against an index called "logstash_test_metrics"

• We then deleted "logstash_test_metrics" and the index pattern for it aswell.

• We needed to modify the logstash conf file and so re-ran the logstash conf file to re-add the logstash_test_metrics index

• We then created the index pattern for this "logstash_test_metrics"

• We'd go to the visualization to be told the underlying index is not there. Actually, it is but because the kibanaSavedObjectMeta.searchSourceJSON now references the index by an ID and not by the actual index name, everything is broken. I have to either recreate the visualization or I have to find the ID for the new index and copy it into the kibanaSavedObjectMeta.searchSourceJSON. This isnt really feasible when I've a LOT of visualizations that all reference the same index.

• Previously on 5.2 the json references an index as shown in the following screenshot.
  
  Now it references an the ID

Indeed I see others on github have mentioned this issue in the past
https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/13980 but I've not seen anything being done about it.

Im referencing my GIthub here aswell for completeness.

Issue: Saved object export/import API

If there are any more details and even screenshots needed I can provide this.
I cant have my users needing to find out what the new index ID value is in order to update all their visualizations. There should be some way of retaining the knowledge of the index name in the visualization/dashboard json metadata so that my users arent asking my all their dashboards are suddenly broken. I feel this is a regression from the previous version and given that I've done a rolling upgrade from 5.2 to 6.2 on my Dev Im not quite sure at what version this changed.

Conor

[Bill_McConaghy]

Work has been done to add this feature to the export (exporting referenced saved objects with visualizations and dashboards) and should be available soon.

[Court (Court Ewing)]

You should be able to avoid modifying JSON and having to go find some automatically generated uuid in this step: We then created the index pattern for this "logstash_test_metrics"

Your saved search has always referenced the index pattern by id, but the id was the name of the index pattern originally. Now, when you are filling out the form to create the index pattern, expand the "advanced options" toggle, which will show you the field for specifying a custom id, and use "logstash_test_metrics" as your id.