Why can't I access the index alias I created to use in Kibana Discover/Visualize?

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

What am I missing? Why can't I access an alias index by name from Kibana?
I currently am using ES/K 7.6.2

I have been working with ES/K since 2014 --- used alias indices all the time. What has changed in 7.x that I am not understanding?

I have a index - my_main_index (ex. 20 records ingested).
I created an alias with a filter on my_main_index, called my_alias_index.

From Dev Tools:

  1. If I query on my_alias_index, the set of 10 records is returned, which is what I expect.

      GET my_alias_index/_search
    {
      "query": {
        "match_all": {}
      }
    }

  2. If I _cat the alias index, the result shows the name my_main_index and the number of records as 20 - not what I expected.
    GET _cat/indices/my_alias_index

From Management -> Index Patterns:

  1. If I try to "Create index pattern", I do not have access to the alias index name - only the main index name. So now I can't bring my_alias_index into Kibana and use it in Discover/Visualize, etc.
2

OK - Finally see that aliases do exist but when you type the alias name in for "create index pattern", the main index name is displayed ("success") - so if I continue to create the index pattern in Kibana, and select "advanced", I can name using the alias name so that I can select it from the dropdown for Discover, Visualize, etc.
Not the most obvious interaction and nothing seems to be mentioned in the create index pattern documentation regarding accessing an alias.

Not happy that I can't list my alias indexes with GET _cat/indices --- is there another way?

3

Lastly, found GET _cat/aliases/ to list the aliases.

4

Hello,

Thanks for posting and looks like you figured it out.

And yes documentation is definitely missing here from Kibana side. Here is an issue I logged for our kibana team - https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/81063

Thanks,
Bhavya

5

Thank you!