Version compatibility of Kibana with Packetbeat

Elastic Stack Beats
1

Hi,

I have started working on Packetbeat & Elasticsearch and need to integrate it Kibana. I found https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions/matrix#matrix_compatibility

Supported Beats Versions

Beats Version Compatibility: 1.0.0 Beta
ES Version Compatibility : 1.4 and higher
Kibana Version Compatibility : 4.1 and higher

But Packetbeat is also working on Kibana 3 (topology is available for Kibana 3 only). Can you please explain if I should go with Kibana 3 (which is now being used in our project) .

2

Hi, Kibana 4 would be the safer bet for the future. With Kibana 4.2, it will support plugins, which means we can implement the topology map in a much better way than we had it in Kibana 3.

The big difference between Kibana 3 and 4 is that 4 makes use of aggregations, which perform a lot better than facets when it comes to the types of visualizations that Packetbeat makes use of. So I'd recommend using Kibana 4 unless you need the topology map right now or you have heavy investments in Kibana 3.