This is a tale of triumph. Of intrigue and mystery, and an unwavering fortitude in the face of incredible odds. For in this tale, we release Kibana's third alpha in two months.

They said this could never happen. They said we'd never make it.

Well, we made it. And you can get Kibana 5.0.0-alpha3 right now.

IMPORTANT: This is alpha software that will only work with Elasticsearch 5.0.0-alpha3. Please test it, but do not use it in production. Indices created in this version will not be compatible with Elasticsearch 5.0.0 GA. Upgrading 5.0.0-alpha3 to any other version is not supported.

With 30 pull requests in 28 days, we focused on making this the most stable pre-release yet. This is also an awesome release for the X-Pack UI, which includes two huge new features:

X-Pack users and roles management

Security UI, meet Users and Roles. Of course, you can still manage your users and roles via the X-Pack API, but why bother when you have that same power at your fingertips from within Kibana itself.

X-Pack reports, now with history

Reports now get queued and processed in the background, so you can generate a lot of reports without worrying about it having a negative impact on Kibana. The reports are then stored and appear in the UI, so you don't need to regenerate the same report over and over again.

And Kibana core, of course

• #6166 Add field exists filter button to doc table
• #7085 Status page can now be configured for anonymous access
• #7148 Bump node.js to 4.4.4 to fix a security vulnerability
• #7126 Histograms on certain date fields no longer triggers an error
• #7123 Custom label is now honored in percentile ranks aggregation
• #6976 Log error when "Export All" query fails
• #7076 Back button now works consistently in visualize
• #7257 Null IP addresses no longer render as 0.0.0.0

What's next?

Beta 1 is still on the horizon, but we want to get one more alpha out before then. You see, when we do launch beta 1, we want to shift our focus away from features and entirely toward stability and upgradability, but we don't yet feel like we've jammed enough features into 5.0.

Keep your eyes peeled for alpha4.

In the meantime, grab alpha3 and help us find all of the bugs. Every. Last. One. We'd love your feedback on our forums and any bug reports on Github. As always, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or IRC as well.