Reporting settings in Kibana

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Reporting settings in Kibana

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You can configure xpack.reporting settings in your kibana.yml to:

Enable reporting

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xpack.reporting.enabled logo cloud
When true, enables the reporting features. Set this to false to disable reporting features entirely. The default is true.

Disabling the reporting features is discouraged. If you need to turn off the ability to generate reports, configure the roles and spaces in the Kibana application privileges.

If needed, you can also prevent a Kibana instance from claiming reporting work by setting xpack.reporting.queue.pollEnabled: false.

Encryption key setting

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By default, an encryption key is generated for the reporting features each time you start Kibana. If a static encryption key is not persisted in the Kibana configuration, any pending reports fail when you restart Kibana.

If you are load balancing across multiple Kibana instances, each instance needs to have the same reporting encryption key. Otherwise, report generation fails if a report is queued through one instance, and another instance picks up the job from the report queue. The instance that picks up the job is unable to decrypt the reporting job metadata.

xpack.reporting.encryptionKey logo cloud
The static encryption key for reporting. Use an alphanumeric text string that is at least 32 characters. By default, Kibana generates a random key when it starts, which causes pending reports to fail after restart. Configure xpack.reporting.encryptionKey to preserve the same key across multiple restarts and multiple Kibana instances.
xpack.reporting.encryptionKey: "something_secret"

Background job settings

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Reporting generates reports in the background and jobs are coordinated using documents in Elasticsearch. Depending on how often you generate reports and the overall number of reports, you might need to change the following settings.

xpack.reporting.capture.maxAttempts logo cloud
If capturing a report fails for any reason, Kibana will re-queue the report job for retry, as many times as this setting. Defaults to 3.
xpack.reporting.queue.indexInterval
How often the index that stores reporting jobs rolls over to a new index. Valid values are year, month, week, day, and hour. Defaults to week.
xpack.reporting.queue.pollEnabled
When true, enables the Kibana instance to poll Elasticsearch for pending jobs and claim them for execution. When false, allows the Kibana instance to only add new jobs to the reporting queue, list jobs, and provide the downloads to completed reports through the UI. This requires a deployment where at least one other Kibana instance in the Elastic cluster has this setting to true. The default is true.

Running multiple instances of Kibana in a cluster for load balancing of reporting requires identical values for xpack.reporting.encryptionKey and, if security is enabled, xpack.security.encryptionKey.

xpack.reporting.queue.pollInterval
Specifies the time that the reporting poller waits between polling the index for any pending Reporting jobs. Can be specified as number of milliseconds. Defaults to 3s.
xpack.reporting.queue.timeout logo cloud
How long each worker has to produce a report. If your machine is slow or under heavy load, you might need to increase this timeout. If a Reporting job execution goes over this time limit, the job is marked as a failure and no download will be available. Can be specified as number of milliseconds. Defaults to 4m.

Capture settings

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Reporting uses an internal "screenshotting" plugin to capture screenshots from Kibana. The following settings control the capturing process.

xpack.screenshotting.capture.timeouts.openUrl logo cloud
Specify the time to allow the Reporting browser to wait for the "Loading…​" screen to dismiss and find the initial data for the page. If the time is exceeded, a screenshot is captured showing the current page, and the download link shows a warning message. Can be specified as number of milliseconds. Defaults to 1m.
xpack.screenshotting.capture.timeouts.waitForElements logo cloud
Specify the time to allow the Reporting browser to wait for all visualization panels to load on the page. If the time is exceeded, a screenshot is captured showing the current page, and the download link shows a warning message. Can be specified as number of milliseconds. Defaults to 1m.
xpack.screenshotting.capture.timeouts.renderComplete logo cloud
Specify the time to allow the Reporting browser to wait for all visualizations to fetch and render the data. If the time is exceeded, a screenshot is captured showing the current page, and the download link shows a warning message. Can be specified as number of milliseconds. Defaults to 2m.

If any timeouts from xpack.screenshotting.capture.timeouts.* settings occur when running a report job, Reporting will log the error and try to continue capturing the page with a screenshot. As a result, a download will be available, but there will likely be errors in the visualizations in the report.

xpack.screenshotting.capture.loadDelay
[8.0.0] Deprecated in 8.0.0. This setting has no effect. Specify the amount of time before taking a screenshot when visualizations are not evented. All visualizations that ship with Kibana are evented, so this setting should not have much effect. If you are seeing empty images instead of visualizations, try increasing this value. NOTE: This setting exists for backwards compatibility, but is unused and therefore does not have an affect on reporting performance.

Chromium settings

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For PDF and PNG reports, Reporting spawns a headless Chromium browser process on the server to load and capture a screenshot of the Kibana app. When installing Kibana on Linux and Windows platforms, the Chromium binary comes bundled with the Kibana download. For Mac platforms, the Chromium binary is downloaded the first time Kibana is started.

xpack.screenshotting.browser.chromium.disableSandbox
It is recommended that you research the feasibility of enabling unprivileged user namespaces. An exception is if you are running Kibana in Docker because the container runs in a user namespace with the built-in seccomp/bpf filters. For more information, refer to Chromium sandbox. Defaults to false for all operating systems except CentOS, Debian, and Red Hat Linux, which use true.
xpack.screenshotting.browser.chromium.proxy.enabled
Enables the proxy for Chromium to use. When set to true, you must also specify the xpack.screenshotting.browser.chromium.proxy.server setting. Defaults to false.
xpack.screenshotting.browser.chromium.proxy.server
The uri for the proxy server. Providing the username and password for the proxy server via the uri is not supported.
xpack.screenshotting.browser.chromium.proxy.bypass
An array of hosts that should not go through the proxy server and should use a direct connection instead. Examples of valid entries are "elastic.co", "*.elastic.co", ".elastic.co", ".elastic.co:5601".

Network policy settings

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To generate PDF reports, Reporting uses the Chromium browser to fully load the Kibana page on the server. This potentially involves sending requests to external hosts. For example, a request might go to an external image server to show a field formatted as an image, or to show an image in a Markdown visualization.

If the Chromium browser is asked to send a request that violates the network policy, Reporting stops processing the page before the request goes out, and the report is marked as a failure. Additional information about the event is in the Kibana server logs.

Kibana installations are not designed to be publicly accessible over the internet. The Reporting network policy and other capabilities of the Elastic Stack security features do not change this condition.

xpack.screenshotting.networkPolicy
Capturing a screenshot from a Kibana page involves sending out requests for all the linked web assets. For example, a Markdown visualization can show an image from a remote server.
xpack.screenshotting.networkPolicy.enabled
When false, disables the Reporting network policy. Defaults to true.
xpack.screenshotting.networkPolicy.rules
A policy is specified as an array of objects that describe what to allow or deny based on a host or protocol. If a host or protocol is not specified, the rule matches any host or protocol.

The rule objects are evaluated sequentially from the beginning to the end of the array, and continue until there is a matching rule. If no rules allow a request, the request is denied.

# Only allow requests to placeholder.com
xpack.screenshotting.networkPolicy:
  rules: [ { allow: true, host: "placeholder.com" } ]
# Only allow requests to https://placeholder.com
xpack.screenshotting.networkPolicy:
  rules: [ { allow: true, host: "placeholder.com", protocol: "https:" } ]

A final allow rule with no host or protocol allows all requests that are not explicitly denied:

# Denies requests from http://placeholder.com, but anything else is allowed.
xpack.screenshotting.networkPolicy:
  rules: [{ allow: false, host: "placeholder.com", protocol: "http:" }, { allow: true }];

A network policy can be composed of multiple rules:

# Allow any request to http://placeholder.com but for any other host, https is required
xpack.screenshotting.networkPolicy
  rules: [
    { allow: true, host: "placeholder.com", protocol: "http:" },
    { allow: true, protocol: "https:" },
  ]

The file: protocol is always denied, even if no network policy is configured.

CSV settings

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xpack.reporting.csv.maxSizeBytes logo cloud
The maximum byte size of a CSV file before being truncated. This setting exists to prevent large exports from causing performance and storage issues. Can be specified as number of bytes. Defaults to 250mb.

We recommend using CSV reports to export moderate amounts of data only. The feature enables analysis of data in external tools, but it’s not intended for bulk export or to backup Elasticsearch data. If you need to export more than 250 MB of CSV, rather than increasing xpack.reporting.csv.maxSizeBytes, please use filters to create multiple smaller reports, or extract the data you need directly from Elasticsearch.

The following deployment configurations may lead to failed report jobs or incomplete reports:

  • Any shard needed for search is unavailable.
  • Data is stored on slow storage tiers.
  • Network latency between nodes is high.
  • Cross-cluster search is used.

To export large amounts of data we recommend using Elasticsearch APIs directly. See Point in time API, or SQL with CSV response data format.

xpack.reporting.csv.scroll.size
Number of documents retrieved from Elasticsearch for each scroll iteration during a CSV export. Defaults to 500.

You may need to lower this setting if the default number of documents creates a strain on network resources.

xpack.reporting.csv.scroll.duration
Amount of time allowed before Kibana cleans the scroll context during a CSV export. Valid option is either auto or time, Defaults to 30s.

If search latency in Elasticsearch is sufficiently high, such as if you are using cross-cluster search, you may either need to increase the time setting or set this config value to auto. When the config value is set to auto the scroll context will be preserved for as long as is possible, before the report task is terminated due to the limits of xpack.reporting.queue.timeout.

xpack.reporting.csv.scroll.strategy
Choose the API method used to page through data during CSV export. Valid options are scroll and pit. Defaults to pit.

Each method has its own unique limitations which are important to understand.

  • Scroll API: Search is limited to 500 shards at the very most. In cases where data shards are unavailable or time out, the export may return partial data.
  • PIT API: Permissions to read data aliases alone will not work: the permissions are needed on the underlying indices or datastreams. In cases where data shards are unavailable or time out, the export will be empty rather than returning partial data.
xpack.reporting.csv.checkForFormulas
Enables a check that warns you when there’s a potential formula included in the output (=, -, +, and @ chars). See OWASP: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/CSV_Injection. Defaults to true.
xpack.reporting.csv.escapeFormulaValues
Escape formula values in cells with a '. See OWASP: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/CSV_Injection. Defaults to true.
xpack.reporting.csv.enablePanelActionDownload
[8.14.0] Deprecated in 8.14.0. This setting will be removed in an upcoming version of Kibana. When true, this setting enables a deprecated feature which allows users to download a CSV export from a saved search panel on a dashboard. When false, users can generate regular CSV reports from a saved search panel on a dashboard and later download them in Stack Management > Reporting. Defaults to false.
xpack.reporting.csv.useByteOrderMarkEncoding
Adds a byte order mark (\ufeff) at the beginning of the CSV file. Defaults to false.

Security settings

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With Security enabled, Reporting has two forms of access control: each user can only access their own reports, and custom roles determine who has privilege to generate reports. When Reporting is configured with Kibana application privileges, you can control the spaces and applications where users are allowed to generate reports.

The xpack.reporting.roles settings are for a deprecated system of access control in Reporting. Turning off this feature allows API Keys to generate reports, and allows reporting access through Kibana application privileges. We recommend you explicitly turn off reporting’s deprecated access control feature by adding xpack.reporting.roles.enabled: false in kibana.yml. This will enable you to create custom roles that provide application privileges for reporting, as described in granting users access to reporting.

xpack.reporting.roles.enabled
[7.14.0] Deprecated in 7.14.0. The default for this setting will be false in an upcoming version of Kibana. Sets access control to a set of assigned reporting roles, specified by xpack.reporting.roles.allow. Defaults to true.
xpack.reporting.roles.allow
[7.14.0] Deprecated in 7.14.0. In addition to superusers, specifies the roles that can generate reports using the Elasticsearch role management APIs. Requires xpack.reporting.roles.enabled to be true. Defaults to [ "reporting_user" ].

Kibana server settings

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To generate screenshots for PNG and PDF reports, Reporting opens the Kibana web interface using a local connection on the server. In most cases, using a local connection to the Kibana server presents no issue. If you prefer the headless browser to connect to Kibana using a specific hostname, there are a number of settings that allow the headless browser to connect to Kibana through a proxy, rather than directly.

The xpack.reporting.kibanaServer settings are optional. Take caution when editing these settings. Adding these settings can cause the reporting features to fail. If report fail, inspect the server logs. The full Kibana URL that Reporting is attempting to open is logged during report execution.

xpack.reporting.kibanaServer.port
The port for accessing Kibana.port`>> value.
xpack.reporting.kibanaServer.protocol
The protocol for accessing Kibana, typically http or https.
xpack.reporting.kibanaServer.hostname
The hostname for accessing Kibana.