Kibana lets people explore information stored in Elasticsearch through a browser. Users can search records, build dashboards and use the configured Elastic applications to investigate operations or application behavior. It is useful when a team needs shared views and saved investigation workflows instead of writing every query from scratch. Those saved objects and settings live largely in Elasticsearch, making an interface upgrade a data-migration concern as well as a container change.
Current guidance
Kibana provides the interface for Elastic dashboards, saved searches, alerting and other applications; its persistent state is largely held in Elasticsearch rather than in the container filesystem. The current upgrade guide requires Elasticsearch to be upgraded first and Kibana to match its version. The old page’s references to historical managed Elasticsearch offerings should not be read as universal compatibility with present-day services.
Before an upgrade, inventory spaces, dashboards, connectors, plugins and encryption-key settings, and take a snapshot that includes the Kibana feature state. Saved-object migrations run when required. Elastic explicitly does not support mixing old and new Kibana instances as a rolling upgrade: shut down outdated instances before starting the upgraded deployment against that cluster.
Rehearse with a restored copy and verify actual user tasks: opening important dashboards, running saved searches, decrypting connector credentials and delivering a test alert. Ensure the Elasticsearch cluster has enough free storage and heap for migration work. Rolling the container image back does not reverse migrated saved objects; recovery depends on an appropriate snapshot and version-compatible restore. ECK or its charts can manage deployment, but they do not remove this application-state boundary.
Historical upstream link check · 2026-10-09
The recorded upstream address redirects to https://www.elastic.co/kibana and returned HTTP 200 on 2026-10-09. Link availability does not certify the historical installation instructions or current security support.
Website availability is separate from project, chart and image support. Use the current guidance and primary sources on this page to assess the distribution.
Historical Kubedex content
Preserved for context. Commands, versions, prices and results below reflect the original research.
Kibana is an open-source data visualization and exploration tool used for log and time series analytics, application monitoring, and operational intelligence use cases. Kibana offers tight integration with Elasticsearch, a popular analytics and search engine, which makes Kibana the default choice for visualizing data stored in Elasticsearch. Kibana is also popular due to its powerful and easy-to-use features such as histograms, line graphs, pie charts, heat maps, and built-in geospatial support.
Is Kibana free to use?
Kibana is a free open-source analytics and visualization tool. You can run Kibana on-premises, on Amazon EC2, or on Amazon Elasticsearch Service. With on-premises or Amazon EC2 deployments, you install Kibana software and maintain it yourself. With Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Kibana is automatically deployed with your domain.
Kibana Benefits
Interactive Charts
Kibana offers intuitive charts and reports that you can use to interactively navigate vast amounts of log data. You can dynamically drag time windows, zoom into specific data subsets, zoom out to see the bigger picture, and drill down on reports to extract actionable insights from your data.
Mapping Support
Kibana comes with powerful geospatial capabilities so that you can seamlessly layer in geographical information on top of your data and visualize results on maps.
Pre-built Aggregations and Filters
Using Kibana’s pre-built aggregations and filters, you can easily run a variety of analytics like histograms, top-N queries, and trends with just a few clicks.
Easy Distribution of Dashboards
You can easily share dashboards and reports with anyone on your team or outside. All they need is a browser to view and explore the data.
What is Kibana used for?
Log Analytics – Analyze un-structured and semi-structured logs generated by servers, applications, mobile devices, and more for a wide variety of applications such as digital marketing, application monitoring, fraud detection, ad tech, gaming, and IoT. Kibana provides analytics templates and visualization tools to explore large amounts of log data and easily gain valuable insights about your machines, applications, and users.
Time Series Analytics – Kibana offers readily available charts and reports to find trends in your data. You can easily drag time windows, and Kibana will perform aggregations on the fly, allowing you to investigate and understand trends in an interactive fashion.
IT Operations Monitoring – Capture server logs and push them into your Elasticsearch cluster. Elasticsearch indexes the data and makes it available for analysis in near real-time (less than one second). You can then use Kibana to visualize the data and perform operational analyses like identifying network issues and disk I/O problems. Your on-call teams can perform statistical aggregations to identify root cause and fix issues.
Getting Started with Kibana on AWS
It’s easy to get started with Kibana on AWS. Amazon Elasticsearch Service comes bundled with Kibana. Simply sign into the AWS Management Console, launch your first Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain, load your data, and start analyzing the data from the Kibana end-point for your domain.
Sources & further reading
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