Debugging Kibana

For information about how to debug unit tests, refer to Debugging Unit Tests.

Server Code

yarn debug will start the server with Node’s inspect flag. Kibana’s development mode will start three processes on ports 9229, 9230, and 9231. Chrome’s developer tools need to be configured to connect to all three connections. Add localhost:<port> for each Kibana process in Chrome’s developer tools connection tab.

Instrumenting with Elastic APM

Kibana ships with the Elastic APM Node.js Agent built-in for debugging purposes.

Its default configuration is meant to be used by core Kibana developers only, but it can easily be re-configured to your needs. In its default configuration it’s disabled and will, once enabled, send APM data to a centrally managed Elasticsearch cluster accessible only to Elastic employees.

To change the location where data is sent, use the serverUrl APM config option. To activate the APM agent, use the active APM config option.

All config options can be set either via environment variables, or by creating an appropriate config file under config/apm.dev.js. For more information about configuring the APM agent, please refer to the documentation.

Example config/apm.dev.js file:

  1. module.exports = {
  2.   active: true,
  3. };

APM Real User Monitoring agent is not available in the Kibana distributables, however the agent can be enabled by setting ELASTIC_APM_ACTIVE to true. flags

  1. ELASTIC_APM_ACTIVE=true yarn start
  2. // activates both Node.js and RUM agent

Once the agent is active, it will trace all incoming HTTP requests to Kibana, monitor for errors, and collect process-level metrics. The collected data will be sent to the APM Server and is viewable in the APM UI in Kibana.

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