What are the main functional differences between Kibana 3 and Kibana 4?

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

The following are some of the main improvements in Kibana 4:

  • New look and feel; charting based on D3
  • Improved workflows
  • New unified visualization builder
  • Unlike Kibana 3, we split out chart creation and dashboard layout into two panes, Visualize and Dashboard. The new process for creating dashboards is to create individual charts in Visualize and control their layout in Dashboard.
  • No longer using Facets (deprecated), now using Aggregations
  • Saved search and visualization management
  • Embedded web server backend for easier deployment based on node.js
  • While you can still deploy a proxy infront of Kibana 4, there is no longer an option to install Kibana 4 to your own web server.
  • Mobile support
  • Scripted fields support
  • Easily embeddable charts
  • CSV data export
  • Improved performance
  • Kibana 4 unifies and parallelizes requests made to Elasticsearch, resulting in better performance for complex dashboards. In Kibana 3, most browsers would need to wait for at least one of the first 3 requests to finish to even attempt loading another panel. So, in any dashboard that includes over 3 panels, significant performance improvements can be expected.
2

There appear to be a number of improvements in Kibana 4, but also a number of features that have been lost. Is there any plan to introduce these to Kibana 4? e.g. Plotting different queries on the same chart, Manually setting the scale of the y-axis, customer intervals on date historgrams (rather than just 'second', 'minute', 'hour', etc.) manually setting chart colours, etc, etc?

3

Hi Richard - Thanks for your question! I'm sure a number of folks are wondering the same thing, so I'm happy to comment.

You can plot different queries on the same chart in K4 using the "Filters" aggregation (see some of the video totorials on that here).

Manually setting the scale on the Y-axis (pull 3464) and custom histogram intervals (pull 3237) are both coming in 4.1, which is going to be released imminently.

Custom color palette (issue 1362) is a little further off, currently targeted to 4.3, but we are absolutely working on this!

If there are other Kibana 3 features you'd really like to see in Kibana 4, please +1 those issues in Github -- we'll get to them as soon as we can!

Thank you!
Tanya

4

Thanks for the reply. I'll try porting some of our reports across using the guides and I'm glad to hear feature parity is coming, it's just a shame some of them are such a long way off. Colour-coding may seem like a minor issue, but it's going to block us migrating from Kibana 3 as we rely on colours to provide at-a-glane status on dashboards as I'm sure many others do. When the colours are arbitrarily assigned it makes the dashboards a little meaningless without careful inspection. This is a real oversight.