Migrating Saved Objects from Kibana 5.5 to 8.1

Elastic Stack Kibana
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1

Hello Community,

we are trying to export our saved objects ( visualizations, dashboards ..) from Kibana 5.5 to Kibana 8.1.

The challenge is that exported saved objects from Kibana are in .json format and the expected format while importing saved objects in Kibana 8.1 is .ndjson.
A workaround we did is converted our json to ndjson using online tools , however still it is not able to parse those saved objects.

There seems a big difference in the structure of both saved objects.

How can we solve this? any help?

2

tagging @Patrick_Mueller for attention to the topic.

3

I don't think this is possible, there are 3 major updates between those versions and a lot of things changed from Kibana 5 to Kibana 8.

This is also not a supported upgrade, so I would not expect this to work either.

You will need to recreate your visualizations and dashboards.

4

thank you for replying @leandrojmp.

I was thinking of an approach that would not include Kibana to Kibana transfer, figure out documents at Elasticsearch 5. x and try to fit it into documents at elastic 8. x, as I saw that the mapping of storing "visualization" and "dashboard" is the same across both elasticsearch versions.

what are your thoughts on this?

5

I don't think it will work.

As I mentioned Kibana 5 and Kibana 8 are 3 major versions apart, a lot of things changed, some visualizations were removed, other where changed and others where added.

Even if you are able to import the visualizations and dashboards from Kibana 5 into Kibana 8 probably a lot of thing would be broken and you would need to individually fix it, sometimes it would be way easier to just recriate them.

6

thank you @leandrojmp for your input.

we have too many visualizations and dashboards in 5.5 and it would be very tough to recreate them in the new Kibana 8. x.

in addition to that,
as evident on the Import objects API | Kibana Guide [8.10] | Elastic compatibility table, we can export saved objects from 6.x -- > 7.x and then 7.x --> 8.x , however there is no such evident that we can do from 5.x-->6.x but i think it is possible to that, so assumig that can finally achieve our goal of migration of 5.x ----> 8.x via a route

5.x -- > 6.x --> 7.x -->8.x

any light on this matter?

7

Unfortunately no.

You will need to test it yourself.

And even if you are able to export/import the saved objects, you should expect to recreate some of them, a lot has change on Kibana from version 5 to 8, depending on your visualizations some of them may not exist/work anymore and I would say that most of them, if not all, are deprecated.

Kibana visualizations uses Kibana Lens now, which was introduced in version 7.5, other kinds of visualizations were deprecated or removed.

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