Product release

Kibana 7.5.0 released

We are excited to announce that Kibana 7.5 is here, and it is a big one! With this release, we’re introducing Kibana Lens, an easy and intuitive way to visualize data in Kibana, as well as externally shareable Canvas workpads and a huge gain in performance with Kibana smart query termination.

And that’s just the beginning!

Excited already? Take 7.5 for a spin by deploying Elasticsearch and Kibana on Elastic Cloud — the only hosted Elasticsearch offering to include these new features — or simply take it for a test drive on your laptop by downloading the latest versions of Kibana and the Elastic Stack.

For a full list of bug fixes and other changes, be sure to look at the Kibana 7.5 release notes.

Kibana Lens

We’re excited to announce the arrival of Kibana Lens, a significant step forward in making data visualization and exploration with the Elastic Stack even easier and more intuitive.

Kibana Lens allows for building data visualizations through dragging and dropping data fields

Lens is a major milestone in the Elastic journey. With the initial beta launch of Kibana Lens, we’re introducing an easy and intuitive way to rapidly gain insight into your Elasticsearch data. With a drag-and-drop experience, smart visualization suggestions, and the ability to quickly switch between chart types and index patterns, slicing and dicing through data in Kibana has never been simpler or more fun.

Whether you’re exploring billions of logs or spotting trends from your website traffic, Lens gets you from data to insights in just a few clicks — no prior experience in Kibana required. Check out our Lens blog post for more details.

Smart query cancellation

In many organizations, Kibana is used by hundreds of users to explore data in various ways through dashboards, visualizations, or via our product offerings. Though Elasticsearch is very fast, users occasionally open dashboards with long time ranges or run complex queries that might take longer to execute. When running these queries, users sometimes want to update the query while it runs, or they just change their mind, navigating somewhere else in their browser before getting the results. Starting in version 7.5, if a user navigates away to a different page or updates a query before getting the results, Kibana applies a smart cancellation policy, canceling the Elasticsearch query. Canceling unnecessary queries improves cluster performance by reducing noise caused by queries that are no longer needed and processing only the queries that are needed, leading to a better and happier cluster overall.

Canvas shareables

Many Canvas fans enjoy the breadth of flexibility that Canvas provides, combining data and art in a meaningful way. Canvas enables you to tell your unique story using data. Now, we’re happy to share a big step forward for Canvas: workpads that can be embedded outside of Kibana. Canvas shareables enable our community to share static Canvas workpads in HTML format using a JavaScript snippet.

Once a Canvas workpad is ready to share, you may want to embed it externally in an app, website, or elsewhere. Canvas shareables allow anyone, even non-Kibana users, to view a static representation of your Elasticsearch data in a pixel-perfect way.

We’re excited at the possibilities Canvas shareables offer by giving users the ability to more broadly display Canvas visuals anywhere, anytime.

Newsfeed

We move pretty fast at Elastic and there are a variety of new products and features coming out with every release. In 7.5, we’ll be introducing a newsfeed that highlights what’s new at Elastic. Stay up to date with blogs, webinars, security vulnerabilities and more!

Kibana 7-5 now provides a newsfeed feature with an updated list of recent release information and other useful materials

Maps

Remember the GeoJSON upload released as Beta in 7.3? Well, it is now GA! GeoJSON upload makes it easy for users to add their own vector shapes to Elastic Maps and leverage them for analysis. We improved the beta with streaming client-side processing and it is now ready for production.

Uploading your GeoJSON into Elastic Maps is now generally available in 7.5

We’ve also added the ability to style based on date and time fields, which makes it easy to track time series data like the recent location of a device or vehicle. And with the new option to sort your map data layers, you can ensure your most important data is on top of the map and most prominent.

Tooltips got several improvements, including drag-and-drop editing, and a new layout to make more room for your data.

Space-level landing page

Now, with a new advanced setting in the Kibana management UI, you can create a custom experience for users by configuring the landing page on a per-space basis. Route all users to a specific dashboard, application, or any saved object as they enter each space.

In Kibana 7-5 you can configure a custom landing page for every Space

SAML authentication preserves the original URL

Use your Kibana URLs with SAML seamlessly. In Kibana, we are working on making security as streamlined and transparent as possible for the end user, aiming to continuously enhance both our security options and the user experience. For those using SSO and SAML in particular, Kibana preserves the original URL to any specific Kibana resource after the SAML dance takes place so that the expected user flow is not disrupted.

Custom space avatar

Customize the icons associated with each of your Kibana spaces by uploading custom images. Make each of your spaces easy to find for your end users.

In Kibana 7-5 you can customize the icons associated with each of your Spaces by uploading custom images.

A new UI for managing API keys

Our new API keys UI allows cluster administrators to view and invalidate all API keys, and users to view and invalidate their own keys. API keys are especially useful when working with automated scripts, or workflow integrations with other software. For example, you can use API keys to automate the ingestion of new data from remote sources, without live user interaction.

Kibana 7-5 introduces a new UI for managing API keys

Machine learning

The new new Machine Learning Overview page helps you get familiar with all the Elastic machine learning capabilities in one place, view your existing machine learning jobs, and provides a quick way to start creating machine learning jobs.

In Kibana 7-5 the new new Machine Learning Overview page helps you get familiar with all the Elastic machine learning capabilities in one place

Creating machine learning jobs just got easier. The Machine Learning Overview page also comes with an updated Advanced Wizard for anomaly detection that takes the user step by step through the process of building a machine learning job.

Along with simplicity, the Machine Learning team is introducing a regression jobs option When creating a new data frame analytics jobs. Now when you create a data frame analytics job you can choose from Outlier Detection or Regression jobs.

As we continue to simplify and make navigation easier, we’re also relocating features to more discoverable and logical places. Transforms are now available in Kibana Management, under Rollups Jobs in the Elasticsearch section, and are no longer in the Machine Learning tab. Transforms is a core Elasticsearch feature that has many uses beyond machine learning and we want to make sure you have it handy.

Observability

7.5 brings a significant expansion of the metrics story and adds several key integrations between APM, logging, and security data for organizations adopting observability initiatives. For instance, we added initial support for viewing endpoint security data directly in the Elastic Metrics and Logs apps.

You can now see endpoint security data directly in the Elastic Metrics and Logs apps

Using Azure? As part of Elastic’s partnership with Microsoft, Observability solutions are introducing turnkey monitoring of Microsoft Azure metrics and logs. Azure metrics advances help Elastic Stack users set up monitoring of critical services more quickly and enable them to combine metrics with important events, such as audit logs from endpoint devices, more efficiently.

“Easy button” navigation helps analysts identify the root cause of incidents faster by quickly navigating traces to logs based on unique identifiers in distributed traces.

In addition, leveraging the powerful machine learning capabilities of Elastic, analysts can now make use of anomaly detection on top of log data and monitor the status of Kubernetes services with Elastic Uptime more effectively via flexible configuration aimed at dynamic environments.

To learn more, check out the Observability announcement.

Elastic Security

Elastic Endpoint Security was launched last month after we joined forces with Endgame! Elastic Endpoint Security is now available to Elastic customers as a standard component of our Enterprise subscription, deployable to all of your endpoints — whether 100 or 100,000 — at no additional cost. Combined with Elastic SIEM, this enables practitioners to hunt for and respond to undiscovered attacks — stopping threats before damage or loss.

Elastic’s security content team has developed seven new machine learning jobs for Elastic SIEM. These jobs automatically detect anomalous activity meriting investigation by security operations or threat hunting teams. Elastic SIEM now supports 23 pre-built machine learning jobs for the security use case, and organizations can still configure custom machine learning jobs to surface anomalies in the SIEM app. For more, check out the Elastic Security blog post.