Product release

Kibana 5.2.0 released

Kibana 5.2.0 has just been released and it has several cool features for you to check out. We've made good progress on visualizations, included a huge community contribution, and brought back Tribe functionality. 

Return of Tribe

We know a lot of our users had used a hack to enable Kibana to query multiple clusters through tribe node. This worked with Kibana 4.x but broke with Kibana 5.0. And we know that caused some pain and blocked upgrades for people. We've fixed that with 5.2.0 and gotten to a much better place for the testing and maintenance of tribe node with Kibana.

5.2.0 introduces the separation of a "data" cluster from an "admin" cluster. The data cluster is the one you typically think of when you use Kibana, as it's the cluster where the data you see is coming from. And that data cluster can be a tribe node. 5.2.0 allows you to configure Kibana to use a different cluster for its administrative functions. These are things like storing your dashboards and visualizations in the .kibana index. This second cluster is called the "admin" cluster, and it cannot refer to a tribe node.

By default, the data cluster and the admin cluster are assumed to be the same cluster, and must not be a tribe node.

There are still a couple of shortcomings that we are investigating: the Console (formerly known as Sense) does not work with separate data and admin clusters. Similarly, we disable the editing of X-Pack users and roles when tribe is configured to avoid any ambiguity about where changes are being made. We don't yet have an ETA on addressing these things, but they're on our radar.

Heatmaps FTW

We have been experimenting with heatmap visualizations for a while, and we now feel confident enough to include them in the 5.2.0 release! Heatmaps are great when you want to pick out an area of high or low volume in time series data. Heatmaps have been cited as helping people see trends that they might otherwise miss.

One common pattern for users will be to create date histograms (with a date histogram aggregation on the X-axis) and then do a terms agg on the y-axis. The buckets in the heatmap are colored based on the metric of your choice. For example, you can choose the count of items in the bucket to influence the color. The heatmap visualization is quite general and you can place any buckets you want on the X and Y axes.

The heatmap feature even allows for custom range settings. For example, you could configure that a given heatmap should show red for places where the count exceeds 95, yellow for 75-94, and so on.

heatmap_5.2.png

The start of internationalization

The initial groundwork for internationalization support in Kibana has landed. Thanks to some work from IBM Kibana is able to load JSON translation files from plugins, which will in the future be used to translate any and all text labels in Kibana. While this is only the groundwork for the overall internationalization support in Kibana, it is a huge step forward and work on the next phase of development has already begun. We wanted to give a big thanks to the contributors here as it was a considerable amount of work with multiple iterations over the course of many months to get right, and we're thrilled with the results so far.

Tile service enhancements

We introduced the Elastic Tile Service a few months ago. Initially, we offered 10 levels of zoom on the tiles. Now, with 5.2.0, X-Pack Basic users will get up to 12 levels of zoom. Additionally, we are exploring how to increase available tilemap zoom levels to 18 levels of zoom. Starting with the 5.2 release of Kibana, we can make these types of service level adjustments dynamically, without releasing new versions of Kibana, so look for further improvements.

Monitoring Elasticsearch in containers

Running Elasticsearch in containers? Want to track CPU usage and throttle time? X-Pack monitoring 5.2.0 adds the ability to monitor the container's utilization metrics that are reported from each of your Elasticsearch instances.

Monitoring Elasticsearch in Containers

If you are running Elasticsearch in a container and would prefer to see these metrics in place of the overall system's CPU metrics, then you can use the container setting to display them in the X-Pack monitoring UI under each Node's Advanced tab, which was added to display more Elasticsearch metrics in 5.1.1.

And more

There are even more features in 5.2.0, including a better experience saving dashboards and visualizations as well as the ability to delete Timelion sheets. The release notes describe all the features plus bug fixes. The downloads are in the usual place. Please let us know at our repo if you see anything else we need to fix!