Authentication Error for User [elastic] When Accessing Elasticsearch from Kibana

TYQ33
Sat, 08 Feb 2025 08:34:14 +0000
Community Ecosystem

Hi everyone,

I'm encountering an authentication issue between Kibana and Elasticsearch. Upon starting Kibana, I receive the following error indicating that Kibana cannot obtain license information from Elasticsearch due to an authentication failure of the user [elastic]. The specific REST request it tries to make is [/_xpack], which results in a 401 unauthorized status.

Here's the error log from Kibana:

{
  "type": "log",
  "@timestamp": "2025-02-08T01:42:20Z",
  "tags": ["warning", "plugins", "licensing"],
  "pid": xxxxx,
  "message": "License information could not be obtained from Elasticsearch due to [security_exception] unable to authenticate user [elastic] for REST request [/_xpack], with { header={ WWW-Authenticate=\"Basic realm=\"security\" charset=\"UTF-8\" } } : ...",
  "wwwAuthenticateDirective": "Basic realm=\"security\" charset=\"UTF-8\" error"
}

Additionally, Elasticsearch logs indicate a similar problem:

Authentication of [elastic] was terminated by realm [reserved] - failed to authenticate user [elastic]

It seems there's a problem with authenticating the 'elastic' user, preventing Kibana from connecting properly. Could this be related to incorrect credentials or misconfiguration? Any advice on troubleshooting steps or configurations to check would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any help!

5 posts - 3 participants