Runtime constraints

Avoid these common mistakes when writing plugin code.

Plugins should rarely, if ever, access Kibana's filesystem directly. Kibana instances are commonly ephemeral and anything written to the filesystem will potentially not be there on restart.

There are generally multiple instances of Kibana all hosted behind a round-robin load-balancer. As a result, storing state in server memory is risky as there is no guarantee that a single end-user's HTTP requests will be served by the same Kibana instance.

Kibana has a number of platform services that don't work with WebSockets, for example authentication and authorization. If your use-case would benefit substantially from websockets, talk to the Kibana Core team about adding support. Do not hack around this limitation.