How to Check Your Elasticsearch Version from Kibana

Introduction

If you’re planning to harness the full power of the Elastic stack — Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana — it’s important to make sure you’ve installed compatible versions of each product. Kibana, for example, should be set up to run alongside an Elasticsearch node of the same version. According to Elastic’s documentation, running different version releases of Elasticsearch and Kibana is not supported. In some situations, it may be necessary to check which version of Elasticsearch is running to see if an upgrade is needed. This step-by-step tutorial will teach you how to check your Elasticsearch version from Kibana.

Prerequisites

Before you attempt to check your Elasticsearch version from Kibana a few key prerequisites need to be in place. For this task the system requirements are simple:

• Elasticsearch needs to be installed and running.
• Kibana needs to be installed and running.

To check if Elasticsearch is running execute the following command in the terminal:

You should receive output containing information about your instance of Elasticsearch.

To confirm that Kibana is running, try pointing a browser to the following url:

You should see the Kibana UI come up in your browser set to the default Discover page.

If either of these products is not running be sure to start them up before moving forward.

Get Elasticsearch Version Using Kibana

Use Get / in Kibana

You can use the Dev Tools console in Kibana to obtain version information about Elasticsearch. If you’re not familiar with the console, accessing Dev Tools is simple.

• Open up Kibana in a browser. If you’re running on a local environment the URL would be:

• Click on “Dev Tools” on the left-hand navigation bar. This will take you to the Console. There are two main parts to the Console: an editor that allows you to create and send requests to Elasticsearch and a response window which shows the results of the request.

Once you’re in the Dev Tools Console, you can issue a GET request with an empty path. Executing this GET request with no parameters will return all the basic information from Elasticsearch including the version number. To issue the request type the following into the left pane in the Console and click the small green triangle that appears to the right of the URL line of the request:

You’ll see the output of this request in the right-hand pane of the Console. The output shown below is a typical example of the results you’d receive from this GET request. In this case, the results indicate that our Elasticsearch version number is 6.6.1:

Issuing this request in Kibana’s Dev Tools console is equivalent to making a GET request directly to Elasticsearch using curl, which will return the same information.

You can actually convert any Kibana query into a curl format using functionality available in the Console. When you compose a query look for the small wrench icon next to the green triangle on the right side of the query. Click the wrench icon and select “Copy to cURL”. This will create an equivalent version of your query in cURL format.

Conclusion

When you’re working with the Elastic stack there will be times when you need to check the version of one or more of your products– it may be to check for compatibility issues, or it might be to see if an upgrade is needed. Fortunately, it’s simple to check your Elasticsearch version using Kibana. With the easy-to-use Dev Tools Console and the step-by-step instructions included in this tutorial you’ll have no problem determining which version of Elasticsearch is running on your server. If you need help managing your database for your application please don’t hesitate to reach out to one of the many database experts at Object Rocket.