Upgrade Kibana

Depending on the Kibana version you’re upgrading from, the upgrade process to 7.0 varies.

Kibana upgrades automatically when starting a new version, as described in this document. Although you do not need to manually back up Kibana before upgrading, we recommend that you have a backup on hand. You can use Snapshot and Restore to back up Kibana data by targeting .kibana* indices. If you are using the Reporting plugin, you can also target .reporting* indices.

Before you begin

Before you upgrade Kibana:

  • Consult the breaking changes.
  • Before you upgrade production servers, test the upgrades in a dev environment.
  • Back up your data with Elasticsearch snapshots. To roll back to an earlier version, you must have a backup of your data.
  • If you are using custom plugins, check that a compatible version is available.
  • Shut down all Kibana nodes. Running more than one Kibana version against the same Elasticseach index is unsupported. If you upgrade while older Kibana nodes are running, the upgrade can fail.

To identify the changes you need to make to upgrade, and to enable you to perform an Elasticsearch rolling upgrade with no downtime, you must upgrade to 6.7 before you upgrade to 7.0.

For a comprehensive overview of the upgrade process, refer to Upgrading the Elastic Stack.

Upgrade from 5.x or earlier

Elasticsearch can read indices created in the previous major version. Before you upgrade to 7.0.0, you must reindex or delete any indices created in 5.x or earlier. For more information, refer to Upgrading the Elastic Stack.

When your reindex is complete, follow the Standard upgrade instructions.

Upgrade from 6.x

The recommended path is to upgrade to 6.8 before upgrading to 7.0. This makes it easier to identify the required changes, and enables you to use the Upgrade Assistant to prepare for your upgrade to 7.0.

The ability to import Kibana 6.x saved searches, visualizations, and dashboards is supported.

Upgrade from 6.8

To help you prepare for your upgrade to 7.0, 6.8 includes an Upgrade Assistant To access the assistant, go to Management > 7.0 Upgrade Assistant.

After you have addressed any issues that were identified by the Upgrade Assistant, upgrade to 7.0.

Known issues

“shard failed” error when viewing Beats dashboards in Kibana

After upgrading to Elasticsearch 7.0, any indices created by Beats 6.6 or older will not work in Kibana dashboards until the index.query.default_field setting is added to each index. Indices created in Beats 6.7 or later are unaffected. To add the setting to the index, you can use the 7.0 Upgrade Assistant, or add the setting manually .

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