Pointing kibana to arbitrary cluster

[mabn0 (Marcin Biegan)]

I tend to access various clusters in various environments, usually via some ssh tunnel. The current version does not allow to specify cluster url. I mean by that that I have to edit configuration and restart, but it will work only with the ES servers with compatible version (I connect to 1.3 - 5.2 ES versions)

The only reasonable option I see is to keep using Kibana 4 with local ES 2.x

1. is there a better way? (tribe node is not an option because of different environements)
2. are there plans to bring back connecting to arbitrary elasticsearch.url ?

[Marius_Dragomir]

Maybe I didn't understand the question very well, but Kibana does support using elasticsearch.url and it will connect to if it is part of the product compatibility matrix. You won't be able to connect to older versions because the compatibility was broken due to changes in the ES syntax.

[mabn0 (Marcin Biegan)]

The problem is that changing elasticsearch.url is cumbersome - I have restart kibana afterwards. Additionally I need (right now) 3 versions - 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 to connect to 5.1/5.2/5.3 clusters, remember which one is where and on which port I run it on my laptop. Again - cumbersome. Kibana 4 works pretty well for all these versions and also with past ones. I'm wondering what are others using in such case. Is Kibana 4 the best solution here?