Migrate dashboards from Kibana3 to Kibana4

Hi,

We are currently using Kibana 3 in my company. We plan to migrate to Kibana4 to benefit new improvements when building dashboards.

My question is : How to migrate my old Kibana 3 dashboards to Kibana 4 ?

Vincent

You cannot, they need to be rebuilt from scratch as the format is entirely different.

There are some videos to help though, you can find them here - https://www.elastic.co/blog/kibana-4-video-tutorials-part-1

That is absolutely stupid. It's going to take days to recreate my Kibana 3 dashboard. That's just ridiculous.

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We understand the problem this creates, however this decision was is necessary due to the large number of underlying changes that were made with the new KB4 architecture.

It'll be worth it though!

I certainly hope so....so far I regret doing the upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5 and I'm staying with Kibana 3 for now.

What problems did you have with 1.4>1.5?

Specifically:

Not being able to choose colours (this is a VISUAL app...how could you leave that out?)
Discovery mode broken on Firefox
Not being able to import my current Kibana 3 dashboard

The color thing really sticks in my craw...I have no idea how you can say Kibana 4 is ready for production when it's lacking a feature that is in Kibana 3.

I don't feel kibana4 is ready yet. It's a significant step backwards. kibana3 is fine, and I'm going to use it until kibana4 is at least equivalent in features.

Honestly, I feel it was a pretty big mistake to require everyone to recreate their dashboards.

As Mark mentioned earlier in the thread, the Kibana team investigated writing a migration tool for the dashboards in Kibana 3 to Kibana 4, as we did and do recognize that this is a major pain point for current Kibana 3 users when they approach the upgrade.

Unfortunately, because Kibana 4 moved from Facets to Aggregations in Elasticsearch, the underlying analytics engine was sufficiently different that it rendered automatic migration next to impossible, as there wasn't always a 1-to-1 mapping between the two sets of functionality. The good news is that Aggregations are so much more powerful (e.g. ability to nest analytic functions), that many of you will be able to re-design your dashboards to do more in Kibana 4.

As for the functional differences between Kibana 3 and Kibana 4, we do realize there there are still some and are tracking Github issues related to many, if not most, of them. We'd love for you to +1 and comment on things you care about most, so we know what to focus on and in what priority. We pay very close attention to that feedback as we do release planning. Thanks for your continued support!

Thank you Tanya...I will look at and comment on the Github issues.

Hello @tbragin Tanya!

Is there any news about migration tool from json dashboards from Kibana 3 to Kibana 4?

There will not be one, it's too difficult with all the underlying changes in versions.

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Has anyone considered the possibility of running Kibana 3 and Kibana 4 side-by-side? If you have done so before, what are the issues you encountered? Or any opinion with that respect?

Has anyone considered the possibility of running Kibana 3 and Kibana 4 side-by-side?

K3 and K4 are completely independent so I don't see why there should be any issues running them side by side (and I've done it since K4 still lacks some K3 features). Do you have any particular concerns?

Cool, thanks @magnusbaeck!

From what I understand thus far is that Kibana 4 has a server-side component and some aggregation. Not sure how does that affect the data stored in Elasticsearch, or if Kibana 4 keeps another sets of indices to help with it's reporting.

Kibana 4 does keep a single index in ES (named .kibana IIRC) but that's just for saving its internal state, i.e. visualizations, dashboards, and other settings.

The only problem I can think of is that soon you'll be wanting to run Kibana 4.2+ which is dependent on Elasticsearch 2.0 in which facets have been removed (as far as I know) and thus Kibana3 wont work anymore.

Yep, exactly.

Hi Vince

Though it old, can you please let me know the process you followed to migrate from kibana 3.0 to 4.0. I am struggling now.