Announcing read-only permissions for Kibana dashboards

Test Elastic's leading-edge, out-of-the-box capabilities. Dive into our sample notebooks in the Elasticsearch Labs repo, start a free cloud trial, or try Elastic on your local machine now.

You’ve been there. You spend an hour building the perfect dashboard to monitor your logs: every chart, every filter, and every label. You share it with your team. A few days later, you open it and something’s off. A colleague tweaked a query. Or someone changed the date range. Maybe they thought they were helping. Now you’re digging through revisions and second-guessing every number. Sound familiar?

That’s exactly why we built read-only dashboards. It’s the control you’ve been asking for. Share dashboards with confidence, without worrying that the next person with edit access will change or break them.

Note: Read-only permissions are available in Elastic Cloud Serverless and from version 9.3 for Elastic Cloud Hosted and Elastic Self-Μanaged.

When “everyone can edit” gets in the way

In Kibana, sharing has usually meant space-level permissions. If someone can create dashboards in a space, they can also edit or delete anyone else’s. That’s great for collaboration until it isn’t. One accidental edit can ripple into wrong decisions, lost trust, and a lot of cleanup.

We’ve heard the workarounds: “We put ‘read-only’ in the dashboard name and hope people notice.” Or: “We tag them and cross our fingers.” Hope isn’t a permission model. You needed a real way to lock a dashboard without locking everyone out of the space.

What actually goes wrong

Deb and Kevin both have edit access to the log monitoring dashboard within the Operations space. Kevin makes some changes to the charts. When Deb comes back, the numbers don’t match what she presented. She has to track down what changed (often from memory), fix it, and wonder how many reports went out with bad data.

Read-only dashboards: Ownership and control that make sense

Read-only dashboards fix this by giving you control to decide whether other users can edit the dashboard. When you share a dashboard, you choose: edit (default, same as today) or view. In view mode, only you (and Kibana admins) can change or delete it. Everyone else can open it, use it, and trust it, but they can’t modify it.

What you get

• Dashboard integrity: In view mode, other users with edit access in the space cannot modify or delete the dashboard. If they try, they’re told it’s locked. Your charts and logic stay as you left them.
• You stay in control: You’re the owner. You can always edit, refine, and update. Sharing as view-only doesn’t lock you out; it locks in the version everyone else sees.
• Flexible lifecycle: You can switch a dashboard back to “can edit” anytime. And Kibana admins can still manage all dashboards (for example, if the owner leaves). No dead ends.

You can share finalized, mission-critical dashboards widely and know they’ll stay consistent. This is available in all Elastic tiers and offerings, including Serverless.

Who can do what?

Quick reference by role:

• Dashboard owner: You created it; you have full edit access.
• Kibana admin: Can manage all dashboards.
• User with space edit: Can create and edit their dashboards; can’t edit or delete view-only dashboards.
• User with space view: Can only view (and list) dashboards.

How to turn on read-only

You can set view-only when you save a new dashboard or later from the share menu.

When saving a new dashboard

• Build your dashboard, and click Save.
• In the “Save as new dashboard” modal, find Permissions.
• Change from Can edit to Can view.
• Click Save. Done. It’s read-only for everyone else.

For a dashboard you already own

• Open the dashboard.
• Open the Share dashboard menu.

• In the sharing modal, find Permissions and switch to Can view. The change applies immediately; other users in the space can no longer edit or delete it.

• You can mouse over the Share action to see what type of permissions a given dashboard has.

Seeing which dashboards are locked

On the main Dashboards list, dashboards you can’t edit or delete have a disabled selection checkbox. This provides an easy way to spot what’s view-only.

In the dashboard, you will also find that the Edit action is disabled and a tooltip will appear, explaining that the dashboard has been set as view-only.

Try it

Read-only dashboards are available now. Create a dashboard, flip it to Can view, and share it. Your team gets a single source of truth, and you get peace of mind. No more “please don’t edit” in the title.

We’d love to hear how you use read-only dashboards. Share your feedback in our community forum.