Today marks a huge milestone in the history of Kibana, software development, and the world. Brace yourself.

Be proud all ye who contribute here, for on this day in May 2016, we scraped some features together, fixed a bunch of bugs, and released Kibana 5.0.0-alpha2.

Pick up your very own, generic copy of Kibana 5.0.0-alpha2 from the downloads page.

IMPORTANT: This is alpha software that will only work with Elasticsearch 5.0.0-alpha2. Please test it, but do not use it in production.

Enough with the warnings, let's start breaking some new stuff. Features, you say?

Sense is now Console, and it ships with every copy of Kibana

Need I say more? Console is the same great Kibana application you've come to rely on, only it now supports the ES 5.0 APIs and is free of any pesky maintenance burden for you or your swarm of devops minions.

Oh, you never used Sense before? Well, feast your eyes on the easiest way on Gaia's green earth to query Elasticsearch:

And there's more!

Some features just aren't very screenshot friendly, but that doesn't mean we love them any less.

• #6896 Configurable header whitelist for requests to Elasticsearch
• #6796 Millisecond support for interval durations
• #6759 Configurable starting day-of-week via advanced settings
• #6583 Kibana generates a persistent UUID to distinguish instances in a cluster

We fixed some bugs as well:

• #6794 Fix extraneous bounds when drawing bounding box on tilemap
• #6246 Honor custom label on percentile and median metrics
• #6407 Honor custom label on standard deviation metrics
• #7003 Stop median visualization from always showing ? for value
• #7009 Url shortener now honors custom kibana.index config values
• #6785 Fix bug where trying to install a plugin by name would fail for some people
• #6953 defaultRoute config now honors basePath and requires leading slash
• #6714 Pattern flag functionality is dropped since it is no longer supported by Elasticsearch
• #6531 Improved warning for when url length is approaching browser limits
• #6602 Improved dark theme support on the new design
• #6760 Removed directory listings for static assets
• #6699 Stopped Kibana logo from randomly disappearing in some situations
• #4029 Improved error message when trying to start Kibana when it is already running

What's next?

It's really quite hush hush, but if you promise not to tell anyone, I'll let you in on a little secret. Kibana 5.0.0-beta1 is coming.

I know, right? I was as shocked as anyone when I heard. It won't be this week, and it won't be next week, but I have it from a reliable source that beta1 will be release during a week sometime in the future.

So what are you waiting for? Grab the alpha2 release and give it a whirl. We'd love to get your feedback on our forums, irc, or even twitter, and please post any bugs you find directly to our github issues.