Kibana Enhanced Tables

December 05, 2021 / Updated: December 12, 2021

Photo Credit: Frank Lam

Updated 2021/12/12: Added link to the PR and some additional information

I have been a Elastic Stack user (previously named ELK) since version 5.1. I think the guys at Elastic are doing a great product with tons of functionality that just works.

Where I work we have this huge Elastic Stack with dozens of nodes in a not-so-updated version, and most of our users rely on a little Kibana plugin that makes the default Data Tables much more useful. This plugin is the famous Enhanced Table plugin by Fabien Baligand.

The problem with Kibana plugins is that you have to update your plugin code with every Kibana version, because the Kibana API changes with every Kibana minor version. Fabien has done a great job with his plugin, updating it version by version from Kibana 5.5 to Kibana 7.11! The problem is that if you want to upgrade your stack to a version that do not have the plugin, all the visualizations that use that plugin become unusable. You can get stuck into a Kibana version if your plugins do not have updated versions!

Since he develops this plugin in his free time, recently he asked for contributors to help in upgrading the plugin to Kibana 7.12+, and I decided to jump into it!

Fabien and I managed to develop a plugin version that runs in Kibana 7.12.1, and he recently merged it to the master branch of the plugin. He also noticed that the same version works perfectly with Kibana 7.13!

This development has been quite a challenge for me since I'm not a skilled Javascript/Typescript developer, but I have learnt some tricks developing this plugin version. I have always wanted to make a contribution to an Open Source project but had never taken the first step. Let's hope this is the first of many contributions!

But, for now, let's try to make the plugin compatible with more Kibana versions!