Kibana provides the user interface for all Elastic solutions. It’s a powerful tool for visualizing and analyzing your data, and for managing and monitoring the Elastic Stack. Although Kibana is not required to use Elasticsearch, it's required for most use cases.

This section includes information on how to set up Kibana and get it running, including:

• Downloading and installing Kibana
• Enrolling Kibana with an Elasticsearch cluster
• Configuring Kibana

To quickly set up Elasticsearch and Kibana in Docker for local development or testing, jump toLocal development installation (quickstart).

Packages of Kibana are provided for and tested against Linux, Darwin, and Windows. Because Kibana runs on Node.js, we include the necessary Node.js binaries for these platforms. Running Kibana against a separately maintained version of Node.js is not supported.

To support certain older Linux platforms (most notably CentOS7/RHEL7), Kibana for Linux ships with a custom build of Node.js with glibc 2.17 support. For details, seeCustom builds of Node.js.

Kibana is provided in the following package formats:

When installing the Elastic Stack, you must use the same version across the entire stack. For example, if you are using Elasticsearch 9.3.0, you install Beats 9.3.0, APM Server 9.3.0, Elasticsearch Hadoop 9.3.0, Kibana 9.3.0, and Logstash 9.3.0.

If you’re upgrading an existing installation, seeUpgrade your deployment, cluster, or orchestrator for information about how to ensure compatibility with 9.3.0.

Running different major version releases of Kibana and Elasticsearch (e.g. Kibana 9.x and Elasticsearch 8.x) is not supported, nor is running a minor version of Kibana that is newer than the version of Elasticsearch (e.g. Kibana 8.14 and Elasticsearch 8.13).

Running a minor version of Elasticsearch that is higher than Kibana will generally work in order to facilitate an upgrade process where Elasticsearch is upgraded first (e.g. Kibana 8.14 and Elasticsearch 8.15). In this configuration, a warning will be logged on Kibana server startup, so it’s only meant to be temporary until Kibana is upgraded to the same version as Elasticsearch.

Running different patch version releases of Kibana and Elasticsearch (e.g. Kibana 9.0.0 and Elasticsearch 9.0.1) is generally supported, though we encourage users to run the same versions of Kibana and Elasticsearch down to the patch version.

If you're deploying the Elastic Stack in a self-managed cluster, then install the Elastic Stack products you want to use in the following order:

• Elasticsearch
• Kibana
• Logstash
• Elastic Agent orBeats
• APM
• Elasticsearch Hadoop

Installing in this order ensures that the components each product depends on are in place.

This table shows the ports that must be accessible in order to operate an Elasticsearch cluster. The Elasticsearch REST and Kibana interfaces must be open to external users in order for the cluster to be usable. The transport API must be accessible between Elasticsearch nodes in the cluster, and to any external clients using the transport API.

By default, Elasticsearch will try to listen to the first port in the specified range. If the port is taken, it will try the next one.

These settings can be overridden in the relevant configuration file.

Additional ports might be required foroptional Elastic Stack components. Refer to the installation guide for the component that you want to install.

Refer toElastic Stack third-party dependencies for the complete list of dependencies.