Reference Kibana dashboards by name in URLs

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

I'm in the process of upgrading one of our systems from ES2.4 to 5.2.2 (latest version of 5 will follow shortly) and have an issue.

When using 2.4 I was able to refer to a Dashboard in a URL by it's name, "General Usage" in this case. With 5x it seems that in links the name has been replaced by an id.

We embed some of the dashboards in iFrames, and with the ids now being unique I'm unable to promote code that references the dashboards from our QA environment to Production without changing the ids, whereas before as long as the Dashboard names were consistent there was no problem.

Is there any way that I can still use the Dashboard name in the URL rather than the new ID? I looked in the Management section of Kibana and can't see a way to change the Dashboard id.

2

hmmmm, just spun up a 6x latest cluster on ElasticCloud and it seems that version of Kibana uses IDs for dashboards too :-/

3

Hi,

Yep. I also tried doing with by adding a custom name for the index pattern id so that system can refer to it with name instead of object id. But it doesn't work.

I am going to ask our dashboard team to take a look at this and keep you posted.

Thanks,
Bhavya

4

Thanks. I'm using my best Google-fu and digging around to see if anyone's managed to do this but haven't found anything yet.

5

Well. I couldn't find anything but had an idea that I tried that seems to work...feels like a bit of a dirty hack though.

Go to Management/Saved Objects, then select and export the dashboards you want to name. Edit the JSON and change the IDs to something that makes sense to you (I changed the ID to Name_not_ID, you'd have to do some more tests to see iff you can have spaces or other odd characters if you need them). Once you've done that save the JSON and import the dashboard.

When you try and share it you should see the new name you applied in place of the id. Remember though that unless you edit it the actual name and description of the dashboard will be the same as the original one so it'll appear you've got 2 copies of the same Dashboard.

It works, so far, but it really feels like it should be something configurable rather than have to do it this way.

6

That is a definite hack and that's why I didn't propose it :slight_smile: But our sharing team is working on it:



Hope this helps.

Thanks,
Bhavya

7

Yeah, I know...but if I want to be able to reference Dashboards and Visualisations consistently across different environments I need something.

I've edited the IDs on the Dashboards and their visualisations now and reloaded it all. I'll have to do the same with the other environments as well now but at least the code is portable.

Good to know a better solution is being looked at.

Adam

8

Using the query parameter 'title' on the listing page might get you what you want (available starting in version 6.1). Make your url something like this:

http://localhost:5601/app/kibana#/dashboards?title=my%20dashboard%20title

If there is only one dashboard called my dashboard title it will auto open it. If there are multiple ones, it'll show you the listing page filtered with that string.

Does this help?

9

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