Product release

Kibana 5.0.0-rc1 released

There's all sorts of hip shaking and loose footing going on right now as we publish the first release candidate of Kibana 5.0 - we just can't contain our excitement.

The 5.0 GA is fast approaching, and with this release of 5.0.0-rc1, we're on track to deliver something big. Something truly unique. Something you never saw coming… unless you download this release candidate and test it out. Then you would have seen what's coming and could ignore what we just said. In fact, if you could go ahead and do that, that'd be great.

In all seriousness (as opposed to less-than-all seriousness), we need your help! This release candidate has all of the features that will be shipping with 5.0, and we want to find every last remaining bug in the build so 5.0 GA can be the most stable Kibana yet.

Download Kibana 5.0.0-rc1 and test it out today. If you find any bugs, please report them on GitHub, and we'll send you some swag as part of our Elastic Pioneer program.

IMPORTANT: This is pre-release software that will only work with Elasticsearch 5.0.0-rc1. Please test it, but do not use it in production.

In addition to the changes listed below, check out the blog posts for our previous 5.0 pre-releases to get a handle on everything that's changed since 4.6:

CSV upload has been removed

We were really excited to ship the CSV upload tool in 5.0.0-alpha4 because it was the first time Kibana could be used to ingest data into Elasticsearch. Unfortunately, after the feature was tested more broadly both internally and externally, it became clear that it was not of the quality that users require, so we've pulled it from the 5.0 release.

We share your frustration on this one, but a feature that only works properly for a very specific use case and essentially falls apart for everyone else isn't good enough to ship with Kibana.

Performance improvement on visualization rendering

Kibana charts are tricky beasts. Visualizations are not simply rendered and forgotten. Kibana must re-render them whenever users resize their browser, toggle the legend, etc.

This works great once the entire page is loaded, but it adds a lot of complexity while visualizations are being loaded for the first time. In the midst of that complexity, Kibana was doing most of the work necessary to render each chart twice. This sort of rendering behavior is by no means a requirement, and it negatively impacted the rendering performance of visualizations.

We've changed that behavior by more carefully controlling the order in which the various components of a visualization get rendered, and the result is faster initial loads for charts in Kibana.

Other changes

  • Refreshing fields on index pattern configuration does not remove selection #8312
  • Mappings can now be fetched when using an index alias #8338
  • Minimum term aggregation size is now 1 #8339
  • Console settings now work properly #8342
  • Enter key now saves settings in Console #8571
  • Long legends no longer expand the height of the entire page #8351
  • Absolute timepicker fields now exactly match current time interval #8383
  • No longer attempt to delete index templates when deleting index patterns #8391
  • Third party backends in Timelion are marked as experimental #8513

What's next?

Hopefully an awesome GA release! But if we find enough bugs in rc1, we'll take a crack at another release candidate. Time will tell, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, download the 5.0.0-rc1 release and help us find some bugs. If you find any, please report them on GitHub, and feel free to ask any questions or provide any feedback on our forums, Twitter, or IRC.