Who out there is still using Kibana 3?

Elastic Stack Kibana
21

@tbragin We spoke today at the meet up. For the "other" pie-slice issue, I was asking if you could use the "sum_other_doc_count" field in the response json. Here's a small snip:

"aggregations": {
"2": {
"doc_count_error_upper_bound": 0,
"sum_other_doc_count": 214,

22

@Sesha_Narahari Thanks for the pointer, I'll get back to you!

23

Kibana 3.
The most cause is the incompatibility between K3 and K4, I cannot recreate all my dashboard.
I understand the 'developer' motivations, but from the point of view as product it was the worst path.
The other are

  • lack of black theme
  • lack to choose color for series
  • lack of panel 'map'
2 Likes
24

There was talk of forking Kibana3. Did anyone set one up? We've made a number of fixes to it internally, and have no problem sharing the fixes.

We agreed with all of the above reasons listed for not upgrading to Kibana4.

Once the major issues are fixed, we will upgrade, but until then, it would be good to maintain K3.

25

@tinle I would love to see your fixes pulled into the fork of Kibana 3!
Here's the github repo that we are tracking: https://github.com/kibana-community/kibana3
I pulled in the latest code from the official branch and some community submitted improvements like csv exports.
We can share ownership of that repo with you to make it easier for you to commit your changes.

26

I'll grab the community tree and merge my fixes in. I won't have time till this long weekend coming up.

27

@Sesha_Narahari indeed, it appears that as a result of recent enhancements, Elasticsearch now has ability to calculate both "other" and "missing" values. We updated the ticket accordingly and tentatively targeted to one of the 4.x releases:

Please comment if you think it's important!

28

@tbragin Thanks so much. Would you be able to put this on a particular release so we can plan our migration?

29

It's currently targeted to 4.3, though that's always subject to change.

30

I am still using kibana 3.

I have been playing with kibana 4.1.2 and I was shocked that simple and very useful things like the country code based map has disappeared.

It is also annoying that you need a server to run kibana 4. Kibana 3 was very easy to install...

Like with all elasric.co tools, the documentation is well, sub optimal.

2 Likes
31

It is also annoying that you need a server to run kibana 4. Kibana 3 was very easy to install...

"Need a server"—could you elaborate? K4 requires you to run a lightweight server-side process with hardly any dependencies while K3 requires a web server that serves static files. Both methods require you to deploy a tarball on a server so the only difference seems to be that K4 requires an init script since we can't piggy-back on the web server's. Is that the problem or am I missing something?

32

K4 requires you to run a lightweight server-side process

We have deployed the kibana 3 static files on our server and allow admin users to access Elasticsearch. With kibana 4 we now have to manage another process on the server and reverse proxy it in some way. Or am I missing something here?

33

No, you're right except that a reverse proxy configuration is optional. I just don't think that spinning up a service is significantly more difficult than configuring a web server and have it serve a specific set of static files.

34

Well, we added the static files to git and they are deployed automatically.

To start and maintain service requires significantly more work:

  • make sure it is started when the server starts
  • when we update the kibana 4 files, do we need to restart the service?
  • what happens when the service dies? How to automatically restart it?
  • we have to expose that service via reverse proxy
35

For such a comparison to be fair you have to start from zero in both cases. Obviously, if you already have automatic deployment of static files to a web site in place then K3 will be easier to deploy. If your existing infrastructure offers other features things play out differently. At my previous job I had Ansible configurations to install and maintain both K3 and K4 and there was no difference in complexity.

36

Hmm, I wonder why kibana is not installable as elasticsearch plugin?

plugin -install elasticsearch/kibana3

or

plugin -install elasticsearch/kibana4

Is there a technical reason, why kibana cannot be installed as plugin???

37

Ah, it seems kibana3 can be installed as plugin (at least for in elasticsearch 0.9)....

Unfortunately kibana 4 cannot be installed as plugin

38

We are using kibana3 and 4, both in an production environment.

The reason for kibana3 is that it is easier to use for user without any knowledge on ES/Lucene.

Although with https://github.com/christian-marie/kibana3_auth we are able to implement field/type based access rules - something that isn´t avaiable for kibana4(maybe with shield, but AFAIK you can only do index based ACLs).

Still kibana4 is great for its interactive dashboards where you can correlate many of data in 1 place and we are glad to have it.

39

Totally second Peters statement. Couldn't agree more.

40

Just rereading the thread... I like this. a lot. Its a great plan. Why dont we just do a K3 GutHub repo and work on that :smile: