Elastic is doing rapid development with Elasticsearch. As of this writing, they’re now on version 6.5.3 – when 6.5.2 was released less than 2 weeks ago!  Luckily, with a package install from repo (such as RPM on CentOS/RHEL), the upgrade process to minor versions is less painful.  However, it’s not without its pitfall. For example, an  upgrade from version 6.4.x to the latest 6.5.x could lead to Kibana not able to start due to incompatible indices.

In order to alleviate this, shutdown the Kibana service, and instruct Elasticsearch to perform a recovery on the .kibana index:

curl --user elasticuser:userpassword -s https://search.mydomain.net:9200/.kibana/_recovery?pretty

If it’s connected to a big cluster with a lot of shards, speed up the recovery process without using replicas:

curl --user elasticuser:userpassword -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -XPUT 'https://search.mydomain.net:9200/.kibana/_settings' -d '{ "index" : { "number_of_replicas" : 0 } }'

Give it a few minutes (depending how much data is there) and then start up Kibana service.  If, for some reason, it still takes a long time, there may be a problem with the migration process.  The kibana.log may indicate something like this:

{“type”:”log”,”@timestamp”:”2018-12-12T17:17:40Z”,”tags”:[“warning”,”stats-collection”],”pid”:15141,”message”:”Unable to fetch data from kibana_settings collector”}
{“type”:”log”,”@timestamp”:”2018-12-12T17:17:42Z”,”tags”:[“reporting”,”warning”],”pid”:15141,”message”:”Enabling the Chromium sandbox provides an additional layer of protection.”}
{“type”:”log”,”@timestamp”:”2018-12-12T17:17:42Z”,”tags”:[“info”,”migrations”],”pid”:15141,”message”:”Creating index .kibana_2.”}
{“type”:”log”,”@timestamp”:”2018-12-12T17:17:44Z”,”tags”:[“warning”,”migrations”],”pid”:15141,”message”:”Another Kibana instance appears to be migrating the index. Waiting for that migration to complete. If no other Kibana instance is attempting migrations, you can get past this message by deleting index .kibana_2 and restarting Kibana.”}

Shutdown Kibana again, and delete the .kibana_2 index:

curl --user elasticuser:userpassword -XDELETE https://search.mydomain.net:9200/.kibana_2

Start the Kibana service again and give it a few more minutes to perform house-keeping.  Kibana should be up and running now.