Upgrade Kibana

Self Managed

When you upgrade Kibana, you also upgrade the Observability and Elastic Security solutions, which use Kibana as their main interface.

When upgrading several Kibana instances connected to the same Elasticsearch cluster, ensure that all outdated instances are shut down before starting the upgrade.

Rolling upgrades are unsupported in Kibana. However, when outdated instances are shut down, you can start all upgraded instances in parallel, which allows all instances to participate in the upgrade in parallel.

For large deployments with more than 10 Kibana instances, and more than 10,000 saved objects, you can reduce the upgrade downtime by bringing up a single Kibana instance and waiting for it to complete the upgrade before bringing up the remaining instances.

Before you start, ensure you take the upgrade preparation steps. Then, take these extra steps to ensure you are ready to upgrade.

Problems with your Elasticsearch cluster can prevent Kibana upgrades from succeeding.

During the upgrade process, Kibana creates new indices into which updated documents are written. If a cluster is approaching the low watermark, there’s a high risk of Kibana not being able to create these. Reading, transforming and writing updated documents can be memory intensive, using more available heap than during routine operation. You must make sure that enough heap is available to prevent requests from timing out or throwing errors from circuit breaker exceptions. You should also ensure that all shards are replicated and assigned.

A healthy cluster has:

• Enough free disk space, at least twice the amount of storage taken up by the .kibana and .kibana_task_manager indices
• Sufficient heap size
• A "green" cluster status

When you perform an upgrade of different Kibana versions, the upgrade can fail. Ensure that all Kibana instances are running the same version, configuration, and plugins.

To upgrade Kibana:

1. Shut down all Kibana instances. Kibana does not support rolling upgrades. Upgrading while older Kibana instances are running can cause data loss or upgrade failures.

2. To install the deb or rpm package:

   a. Use rpm or dpkg. This installs all files in their proper locations and will not overwrite the config files. b. Upgrade any plugins by removing the existing plugin and reinstalling the appropriate version using the kibana-plugin script. For more information, see Kibana plugins.

3. To install from a zip or tar.gz archive:

   a. Extract the archive to a new directory to be sure that you don’t overwrite the config or data directories. b. Copy the files from the config directory from your old installation to your new installation. c. Copy the files from the data directory from your old installation to your new installation.

   Important

   If you use monitoring features, you must re-use the data directory when you upgrade Kibana. Otherwise, the Kibana instance is assigned a new persistent UUID and becomes a new instance in the monitoring data.

   d. Install the appropriate versions of all your plugins for your new installation using the kibana-plugin script. For more information, see Kibana plugins.

4. Start Kibana.