What does index pattern consist of?

[jhagen92 (Jonathan Hagen)]

Hi.

I am new to Kibana. I already have existing index patterns and logs, so I mostly worked with visualization and dashboard. However, I don't quite understand index pattern.

Can someone please explain index pattern in detail? I found https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/index-patterns.html, but I need little more understanding.

The reason why I am asking is when I export dashboard, it saves index pattern. When I import that json file to prod, it overwrites index pattern as well. I would like to understand what kind of changes that index pattern can have like fields or property.

Thanks.

[rashmi (kulkarni)]

Hi

welcome to kibana discuss forums. When a user loads up Kibana in their browser for the first time, they are required to create an index pattern. Of course, they can add more index patterns at a later time as well.

Whenever users create a new index pattern, a document is created in the .kibana index, under the index-pattern document type. Kibana does not automatically update index patterns, but there is an option in Management > Index Patterns > Your Index Pattern to refresh the list of fields based on what it finds in the indexes.
Visualizations are tied to index-patterns, so on every environment you should have the same index-pattern configured with the same IDs.

You can read about index patterns in this blog - which gives a detailed description of it . Its a bit old blog, but most of it is still is relavant.

Kibana under the hood: object persistence

Hope this helps,
Thanks
Rashmi