IMPORTANT: No additional bug fixes or documentation updates will be released for this version. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.
Elastic Docs ›Kibana Guide [8.2] ›Set up ›Upgrade Kibana
« Migrate saved objects Roll back to a previous version of Kibana »

Resolve migration failuresedit

Migrating Kibana primarily involves migrating saved object documents to be compatible with the new version.

Saved object migration failuresedit

If Kibana unexpectedly terminates while migrating a saved object index, Kibana automatically attempts to perform the migration again when the process restarts. Do not delete any saved objects indices to fix a failed migration. Unlike previous versions, Kibana 7.12.0 and later does not require deleting indices to release a failed migration lock.

If upgrade migrations fail repeatedly, refer to preparing for migration. When you address the root cause for the migration failure, Kibana automatically retries the migration. If you’re unable to resolve a failed migration, contact Support.

Old .kibana_N indicesedit

After the migrations complete, multiple Kibana indices are created in Elasticsearch: (.kibana_1, .kibana_2, .kibana_7.12.0 etc). Kibana only uses the index that the .kibana and .kibana_task_manager aliases point to. The other Kibana indices can be safely deleted, but are left around as a matter of historical record, and to facilitate rolling Kibana back to a previous version.

Known issues with Fleet betaedit

If you see a`timeout_exception` or receive_timeout_transport_exception error, it might be from a known known issue in 7.12.0 if you tried the Fleet beta. Upgrade migrations fail because of a large number of documents in the .kibana index, which causes Kibana to log errors such as:

Error: Unable to complete saved object migrations for the [.kibana] index. Please check the health of your Elasticsearch cluster and try again. Error: [receive_timeout_transport_exception]: [instance-0000000002][10.32.1.112:19541][cluster:monitor/task/get] request_id [2648] timed out after [59940ms]

Error: Unable to complete saved object migrations for the [.kibana] index. Please check the health of your Elasticsearch cluster and try again. Error: [timeout_exception]: Timed out waiting for completion of [org.elasticsearch.index.reindex.BulkByScrollTask@6a74c54]

For instructions on how to mitigate the known issue, refer to the GitHub issue.

Corrupt saved objectsedit

To find and remedy problems caused by corrupt documents, we highly recommend testing your Kibana upgrade in a development cluster, especially when there are custom integrations that create saved objects in your environment.

Saved objects that are corrupted through manual editing or integrations cause migration failures with a log message, such as Unable to migrate the corrupt Saved Object document .... For a successful upgrade migration, you must fix or delete corrupt documents.

For example, you receive the following error message:

Unable to migrate the corrupt saved object document with _id: 'marketing_space:dashboard:e3c5fc71-ac71-4805-bcab-2bcc9cc93275'. To allow migrations to proceed, please delete this document from the [.kibana_7.12.0_001] index.

To delete the documents that cause migrations to fail, take the following steps:

  1. Create a role as follows:

    PUT _security/role/grant_kibana_system_indices
{
  "indices": [
    {
      "names": [
        ".kibana*"
      ],
      "privileges": [
        "all"
      ],
      "allow_restricted_indices": true
    }
  ]
}

  2. Create a user with the role above and superuser built-in role:

    POST /_security/user/temporarykibanasuperuser
{
  "password" : "l0ng-r4nd0m-p@ssw0rd",
  "roles" : [ "superuser", "grant_kibana_system_indices" ]
}

  3. Remove the write block which the migration system has placed on the previous index:

    PUT .kibana_7.12.1_001/_settings
{
  "index": {
    "blocks.write": false
  }
}

  4. Delete the corrupt document:

    DELETE .kibana_7.12.0_001/_doc/marketing_space:dashboard:e3c5fc71-ac71-4805-bcab-2bcc9cc93275

  5. Restart Kibana.

    The dashboard with the e3c5fc71-ac71-4805-bcab-2bcc9cc93275 ID that belongs to the marketing_space space is no longer available.

Documents for unknown saved objectsedit

Migrations will fail if saved objects belong to an unknown saved object type. Unknown saved objects are typically caused by to the Elasticsearch index, or by disabling a plugin that had previously created a saved object.

We recommend using the Upgrade Assistant to discover and remedy any unknown saved object types. Kibana version 7.17.0 deployments containing unknown saved object types will also log the following warning message:

CHECK_UNKNOWN_DOCUMENTS Upgrades will fail for 8.0+ because documents were found for unknown saved object types. To ensure that upgrades will succeed in the future, either re-enable plugins or delete these documents from the ".kibana_7.17.0_001" index after the current upgrade completes.

If you fail to remedy this, your upgrade to 8.0+ will fail with a message like:

Unable to complete saved object migrations for the [.kibana] index: Migration failed because documents were found for unknown saved object types. To proceed with the migration, please delete these documents from the ".kibana_7.17.0_001" index.

Incompatible settings or mappingsedit

Matching index templates that specify settings.refresh_interval or mappings are known to interfere with Kibana upgrades. This can happen when index templates are defined manually.

To make sure the index templates won’t apply to new .kibana* indices, narrow down the data views of any user-defined index templates.

Incompatible xpack.tasks.index configuration settingedit

In Kibana 7.5.0 and earlier, when the task manager index is set to .tasks with the configuration setting xpack.tasks.index: ".tasks", upgrade migrations fail. In Kibana 7.5.1 and later, the incompatible configuration setting prevents upgrade migrations from starting.

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