Using Kibana 4 in automated deployments

[grandseiken]

Due to the automated/temporary nature of our deployments, it's not feasible to require any manual Kibana configuration (e.g. using the GUI or pasting JSON into web forms). Currently we simply deploy Kibana 3 along with some templated/scripted dashboards (from source control) to each cluster, which works well.

Kibana 4 has removed the templated/scripted dashboards feature. As far as I can tell, the intended replacement for our use-case is to encode the entire dashboard state into the URL parameters. This has several drawbacks:

• the URL parameters don't support generating visualizations, so we'd apparently need some scripted step to save visualizations into ElasticSearch beforehand.
• the definition for a dashboard can no longer be contained in a file alongside Kibana. Instead it would have to be moved to some other external service that's responsible for constructing these dashboard URLs.
• the logic available in a scripted dashboard (e.g. parameterised/procedurally-generated dashboards, default values for parameters, code-sharing) is not well-supported by URL parameters. We would have to hack something together on the separate dashboard-URL service, which is not a good place for this logic.

Am I missing something? It seems like this (not uncommon) use-case was supported in a simple and straightforward way before, and now we have to jump through some rather bizarre hoops.

[rashidkpc]

Thanks for the comments, its a nice wrap up of what others have said in other tickets. We're considering ways to bring back some of this functionality including allowing visualizations to be defined within the dashboard schema.

Because the points in this ticket are covered in #2116 and #2310 I'm going to close this, but please add your thought to those tickets!