Kibana is your window into the Elastic Stack. Specifically, it's a browser-based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch.
If you just want to try Kibana out, check out the Elastic Stack Getting Started Page to give it a whirl.
If you're interested in diving a bit deeper and getting a taste of Kibana's capabilities, head over to the Kibana Getting Started Page.
If you want to use a Kibana release in production, give it a test run, or just play around:
You might want to build Kibana locally to contribute some code, test out the latest features, or try out an open PR:
Visit Elastic.co for the full Kibana documentation.
For information about building the documentation, see the README in elastic/docs.
Ideally, you should be running Elasticsearch and Kibana with matching version numbers. If your Elasticsearch has an older version number or a newer major number than Kibana, then Kibana will fail to run. If Elasticsearch has a newer minor or patch number than Kibana, then the Kibana Server will log a warning.
Note: The version numbers below are only examples, meant to illustrate the relationships between different types of version numbers.
| Situation | Example Kibana version | Example ES version | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Versions are the same. | 7.15.1 | 7.15.1 | 💚 OK |
| ES patch number is newer. | 7.15.0 | 7.15.1 | ⚠️ Logged warning |
| ES minor number is newer. | 7.14.2 | 7.15.0 | ⚠️ Logged warning |
| ES major number is newer. | 7.15.1 | 8.0.0 | 🚫 Fatal error |
| ES patch number is older. | 7.15.1 | 7.15.0 | ⚠️ Logged warning |
| ES minor number is older. | 7.15.1 | 7.14.2 | 🚫 Fatal error |
| ES major number is older. | 8.0.0 | 7.15.1 | 🚫 Fatal error |