Using Kibana with Tribe nodes

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Using Kibana with Tribe nodes

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While tribe nodes have been deprecated in Elasticsearch in favor of Cross-cluster search, you can still use Kibana with tribe nodes until version 7.0. Unlike tribe nodes, using cross cluster search in Kibana requires no server-side configurations and doesn’t disable functionality like Console.

Kibana can be configured to connect to a tribe node for data retrieval. Because tribe nodes can’t create indices, Kibana additionally requires a separate connection to a node to maintain state. When configured, searches and visualizations will retrieve data using the tribe node and administrative actions (such as saving a dashboard) will be sent to non-tribe node.

Configuring Kibana for tribe nodes

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Tribe nodes take all of the same configuration options used when configuring elasticsearch in kibana.yml. Tribe options are prefixed with elasticsearch.tribe and at a minimum requires a url:

elasticsearch.hosts: ["<your_administration_node>"]
elasticsearch.tribe.hosts: ["<your_tribe_node>"]

When configured to use a tribe node, actions that modify Kibana’s state will be sent to the nodes at elasticsearch.hosts. Searches and visualizations will retrieve data from the nodes configured at elasticsearch.tribe.hosts. It’s acceptable to use nodes for elasticsearch.hosts that is part of one of the clusters that a tribe node is pointing to.

The full list of configurations can be found at Configuring Kibana.

Limitations

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Due to the ambiguity of which cluster is being used, certain features are disabled in Kibana:

  • Console
  • Managing users and roles with the x-pack plugin