News

Kibana 4.2 Beta 1: I Heard You Like Betas

By
Spencer Alger

Have you been trying out the brand new Elasticsearch 2.0.0-beta1? Do you want to use Kibana with your test installation? Well, have I got news for you! Today we're releasing a beta for your beta, Kibana 4.2.0-beta1.

This release offers support for the first Elasticsearch 2.0 beta along with a handful of features and bug fixes. If you are too excited to stick around, go right ahead and download Kibana 4.2.0-beta1. If you are interested in what you are downloading however, lets take a look at some of the new features.

Persistent Colors

Starting in the 4.2 beta, generated colors are bound to the data they represent. This means that you no longer have to worry about the same color meaning multiple things on a single dashboard, hooray! — Thanks @gauravsinghania!

Persisted Color Example

Server Status

In order to help people get a better idea of why Kibana may not be able to run, we now include a status page which can be accessed at any time, but also shows up automatically when there is a problem. For instance, if the Kibana server loses connectivity with Elasticsearch:

Status Page Animating between Green and Red

Filter using the legend

Each visualization's legend is a useful way to see the groups that data falls into, but now it's also a great way to filter a visualization by one of those groups! Just click on any of the labels and a filter will be added to the filter bar at the top of the page. This works across an entire dashboard, but combine it with the pinned filters introduced in 4.1 and your filter now applies to all of Kibana.

Olson timezone support

One of the features we are excited about in Elasticsearch 2.0 is the enhanced timezone support in the date_histogram aggregation. Support for Olson timezone identifiers allows Elasticsearch to more accurately understand the UTC offset of every single event, even when a histogram covers a shift in UTC offset like the start of daylight savings time. This means that Kibana can better show when events happened in your local timezone.

Structural Improvements

Kibana 4.2 also introduces several structural improvements including:

  • Updated many of the libraries that Kibana uses
  • We've "shrink-wrapped" dependencies to guarantee consistent builds
  • Unit test suites now run in real and varied browsers; now results better reflect how Kibana runs in the wild


Thank you to all of the contributors who have helped us pull this beta together. There are many other features, tweaks, and bug fixes that we couldn't mention here and they wouldn't be possible without you.

If you have questions (or want to help answer some) please check out the Discuss Kibana forums. If you find a bug, please file it on Github. Make something great? Tell @elastic about your #kibana dashboards on twitter. Happy data hunting!