Configure Kibana

The Kibana server reads properties from the kibana.yml file on startup.

The location of this file differs depending on how you installed Kibana:

  • Archive distributions (.tar.gz or .zip): Default location is $KIBANA_HOME/config
  • Package distributions (Debian or RPM): Default location is /etc/kibana

The config directory can be changed using the KBN_PATH_CONF environment variable:

KBN_PATH_CONF=/home/kibana/config ./bin/kibana

The default host and port settings configure Kibana to run on localhost:5601. To change this behavior and allow remote users to connect, you need to update your server.host and server.port settings in the kibana.yml file.

In this file, you can also enable SSL and set a variety of other options.

Environment variables can be injected into configuration using ${MY_ENV_VAR} syntax. By default, configuration validation will fail if an environment variable used in the config file is not present when Kibana starts. This behavior can be changed by using a default value for the environment variable, using the ${MY_ENV_VAR:defaultValue} syntax.

Most Kibana settings are read only at startup, so changing them requires a restart. The logging configuration is an exception: Kibana re-reads kibana.yml and re-applies its logging settings when the process receives a SIGHUP signal, without restarting.

This is useful to temporarily raise verbosity while troubleshooting: adjust logging.root.level, a specific dedicated logger, or meta filters in kibana.yml, reload, capture the logs you need, then revert and reload again.

To reload the logging configuration:

  1. Edit the logging settings in kibana.yml.

  2. Send SIGHUP to the Kibana process:

    kill -HUP <kibana_pid>

    On Docker, signal the container instead:

    docker kill --signal=HUP <container_id>

    If you run Kibana with multiple worker processes, send the signal to each process.

  3. Confirm the reload in the Kibana logs. You should see a message such as Reloaded logging configuration due to SIGHUP.

Note

SIGHUP is not available on Windows. On Windows, restart Kibana to apply logging configuration changes.

For a complete list of settings that you can apply to Kibana, refer to Kibana configuration reference.

Refer to the following documentation to learn how to perform key configuration tasks for Kibana: