Why reporting is a part of x-pack?

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

I want to ask a general question, regrading generating reports from kibana:
A very useful feature of kibana is the abilty to generate reports and export dashboards and visualizations automaticly. The thing I don't get is why generating reports is fixed to installing a package that it's main focus is authentication and security.
Plus, I tried severel times to install x-pack in my elastic stack 6.X just to get the reporting feature, and the amount of security configuration and security related error handeling was overwhelming.
Why do I need to struggle with the security stuff that I'm not interested in just to get the reporting stuff?
Is there a possibility that in one of the next versions of the elastic stack thos two things will be seperated?
By the way: if it's not the place for this message, please show where should I write it.
Thank you!

2

Hi @yishain11,

When it comes to specialized functionality, it is generally added to X-pack instead of Kibana core. Reporting, which includes pdf and csv exports, falls into that bucket. There's a grey zone of course, and I understand this could be useful in more general situations too.

As for the security-setup that comes with X-pack, you can avoid this by turning off the security-plugin.

In both the config/elasticsearch.yml and the config/kibana.yml files, turn of the plugin by adding this line:

xpack.security.enabled: false

This will turn off security, but keep Reporting activated.

3

Hi, thanks for the answer.
If I set the security plugin off, can I ignore all the setup in the x-pack documentation? Because the documentation of x-pack doesn't show this option at all, but present as if you can't install x-pack without it.

4

yes, you'll be able to ignore the setup for that particular plugin. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/x-pack/current/installing-xpack.html#xpack-enabling

So when you turn off xpack.security you can ignore all the other parameters under xpack.security.* (so ignore everything here https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/6.1/security-settings.html).

5

Thank you. Everything works

6

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