Standard Upgrade with Reindexedit

You must perform a reindex in Elasticsearch whenever you’re upgrading Kibana that has an existing .kibana index created prior to Elasticsearch 2.0.

This is the case if you’re upgrading directly from Kibana 4.1 or 4.0 as well as when your existing install of Kibana 4.2+ was previously upgraded from 4.1 or 4.0.

Reindexing is the process of creating a new index with updated syntax and mappings directly from an existing index. While it is possible to do this manually, we recommend using the Elasticsearch Migration Plugin as described in the Elasticsearch Reindex to upgrade guide.

The Elasticsearch Migration Plugin creates a versioned .kibana index as well as an index alias that points to it. Kibana 5.0 supports this index alias, but if you want to run Kibana 4.x while this Elastic stack upgrade is underway, you’ll need to configure your Kibana 4.x install to point to the versioned index using the kibana.index configuration in your kibana.yml file.

Once your reindex is complete, you can follow the Standard Upgrade instructions.