Product release

Kibana 6.1.0 is released

Welcome to the 6.1.0 release of Kibana!

You may be thinking "But wait, you just released 6.0?"... I know, right! But 6.1.0 has been percolating for months and now it is here.

New in this release we have:  

  • Dashboard Input Controls
  • Kibana Homepage
  • Monitoring Supports Cross Cluster Search
  • Lab Visualizations
  • Pie Chart Data Labels
  • Better Disconnected Operation for Region Maps
  • Preserve Dashboard Layout in Reporting
  • Custom Panel Titles in Dashboard
  • License Management
  • Store Kibana Settings Securely

Dashboard Input Controls

You can now create input control visualization components which when placed on a Dashboard allow users to select particular values from a terms aggregation from a multi-select drop down control or select a range from a min/max aggregation using a range slider control. This will make it easy to guide users to important filtering values for the dashboard and make it simple for them to apply filters and explore the information on the dashboard.

InputControlVisualization.png

InputControls2.png

Kibana Homepage

Kibana has a homepage! Finally clicking on the Kibana logo in the upper left will do something useful! And finally new users will get some great pointers as to what to do with Kibana when they launch it for the first time! Please watch this space, there is a lot more coming...

KibanaHomeFull.png

Kibana Directory Full.png

Monitoring Supports Cross Cluster Search

Beginning with X-Pack monitoring 6.1, the Monitoring UI will automatically use Cross Cluster Search to load data from remote clusters defined using the Elasticsearch connection's remote cluster list . That means if you only define elasticsearch.url in your kibana.yml, and configure your dedicated monitoring clusters as remote clusters of it, then the Monitoring UI will detect and show all clusters! We also took the time to optimize the experience so that it routes requests to specific monitoring clusters whenever possible. This provides multiple advantages over the existing behavior:

  • Clusters from multiple monitoring clusters can be viewed from a single user interface.
    • You can now show all monitoring clusters from your Elasticsearch deployments in a single Monitoring UI without exporting all data to a single place.
    • This is the same behavior as existing functionality when multiple clusters send their monitoring data to a single monitoring cluster, but now it is capable of reading from as many monitoring clusters as are defined.
  • By depending on the Elasticsearch cluster defined at elasticsearch.url in your kibana.yml file, you can:
    • Simplify your Kibana deployments by removing the need for xpack.monitoring.elasticsearch.url being set.
    • Reuse X-Pack monitoring data across the rest of Kibana, which is not possible when using xpack.monitoring.elasticsearch.url to connect to a separate cluster because only the Monitoring UI makes use of that connection.
    • Dynamically add new monitoring clusters using the existing Cross Cluster Search APIs in Elasticsearch without touching Kibana.
    • Take advantage of the new skip_unavailable setting for remote clusters in the Cross Cluster Search API.

Using Cross Cluster Search is now the preferred way to talk to a dedicated monitoring cluster because of these benefits and simplifications. We hope that it helps you to both improve your Elastic Stack monitoring and simplify it at the same time.

ccs.png

Lab Visualizations

Newly introduced visualizations can now be part of labs-mode. Visualizations in labs-mode introduce new more cutting-edge functionality and can be subject to change across minor releases. Labs-mode can be turned off in the advanced settings. Labs-visualization will then no longer be available to the user. The Time Series Visual Builder is not part of labs-mode, it continues to be an experimental feature. The input controls are the first to be flagged as a lab visualization.

LabsMode.png

Pie Chart Data Labels

Pie charts now support data labels making it easy to understand the values being presented without having to look back and forth to a legend.

Pie Chart Labels.png

Better Disconnected Operation for Region Maps

We have improved the use of Region Maps for deployment in environments without internet access. Similar to the Coordinate Map visualization, the Region map can now use a WMS-service as a base-layer. Admins can now also setup Kibana to opt-out of connection to the Elastic Maps Service. Users can now opt-out of having the visualization display warnings.

RegionMapExample.png

Preserve Dashboard Layout in Reporting

Reporting now has the ability to render Dashboards in a WYSIWYG manner to PDF preserving the locations and sizes of panels on the dashboard.

pdf-reporting.png

preserve-layout.png

Custom Panel Titles in Dashboard

There are now additional options for customizing the content on Dashboards. We've added a new option to "use margins" to add separation between Dashboard panels. We've also added the capability to customize the panel titles or hide them altogether. 

Panel Titles 1.png

Panel Titles 2.png

Panel Titles 3.png

License Management

The Management application now supports managing the license for your cluster including seeing your current license level and expiration information, links out to obtain a Basic or a paid license and support for uploading and installing a new license. We've also made sure that you'll be able to log into Kibana to use this tool even if your license has expired.

License Management 1.png

License Management 2.png

Store Kibana Settings Securely

Some settings are sensitive, and relying on filesystem permissions to protect their values is not sufficient. For this use case, Kibana provides a keystore, and the kibana-keystore tool to manage the settings in the keystore. 

[More information here: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/6.1/secure-...]

    Conclusion

    Please download Kibana 6.1.0, try it out, and let us know what you think on Twitter (@elastic) or in our forum. You can report any problems on the Github issues page.