Tech Topics

Kibana 4 Beta 2: Get It Now

By
Rashid Khan

Eeeeeeeee! It's here! Kibana 4 Beta 2 is ready to be poked, prodded, and otherwise fiddled with by you, your friends, and your exceptionally intelligent pets. We look forward to your feedback.

If you just can't wait to get started, grab Kibana 4 Beta 2 here, otherwise read on for the good stuff.

Along with dozens of small tweaks and fixes, here are some of the fun new things to look out for in this release of Kibana:

Map Support

Maps are back and they are more powerful than ever! The new tile map visualization makes use of Elasticsearch's awesomely powerful geohash_grid to display geographic data, such as visualizing relative response times:

Visualization Options

In Beta 1, bar charts were always stacked. In Kibana 4 Beta 2, we've added options that allow you to modify how visualizations display their data. For example, by grouping bars:

Or displaying bars as percentages:

Area Charts

Beta 2 brings back area charts, both stacked and unstacked:

Advanced Parameters

We aim to support as many Elasticsearch features as possible, but sometimes we just haven't gotten to that one aggregation option you really need right now. For that option, we've introduced a JSON input which allows you to specify additional aggregation parameters to send with your request. For example, maybe you want to pass shard_size in a terms agg, or increase the precision_threshold in a cardinality agg. In this case, we pass a script as an advanced parameter, taking the log of the _value of the bytes field and placing it on the X-axis:

Data Tables

Sometimes you want a flashy chart, and sometimes you just want the numbers. The data table visualization makes that desire a reality:

Hey! Where Did My Dashboards Go?

The internal Kibana index changed from kibana-int to .kibana. We recommend you move your documents (e.g., dashboards, settings, visualizations) from the old index to the new one. However you can also simply set kibanaIndex: "kibana-int" in kibana.yml.

What Are We Working on Now?

Check out our path to Kibana 4 GA on our roadmap. As always, we welcome feedback/bugs/fixes on GitHub