Reporting troubleshooting

Having trouble? Here are solutions to common problems you might encounter while using Reporting.

Reporting comes with a built-in utility to try to automatically find common issues. When Kibana is running, navigate to the Report Listing page, and click Run reporting diagnostics. This will open up a diagnostic tool that checks various parts of the Kibana deployment and come up with any relevant recommendations.

If the diagnostic information doesn’t reveal the problem, you can troubleshoot further by starting the Kibana server with an environment variable for revealing additional debugging logs. Refer to Puppeteer debug logs.

If a report label is rendered as an empty rectangle, no system fonts are available. Install at least one font package on the system.

If the report is missing certain Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters, ensure that a system font with those characters is installed.

There is currently a known limitation with the Data Table visualization that only the first page of data rows, which are the only data visible on the screen, are shown in PDF reports.

Ensure that the headless_shell binary located in your Kibana data directory is owned by the user who is running Kibana, that the user has the execute permission, and if applicable, that the filesystem is mounted with the exec option.

Whenever possible, a Reporting error message tries to be as self-explanatory as possible. Here are some error messages you might encounter, along with the solution.

If you are running multiple instances of Kibana in a cluster, the instances share the work of executing report jobs to evenly distribute the work load. Each instance searches the reporting index for "pending" jobs that the user has requested. It is possible for multiple instances to find the same job in these searches. Only the instance that successfully updated the job status to "processing" will actually execute the report job. The other instances that unsuccessfully tried to make the same update will log something similar to this:

StatusCodeError: [version_conflict_engine_exception] [...]: version conflict, required seqNo [6124], primary term [1]. current document has seqNo [6125] and primary term [1], with { ... }
  status: 409,
  displayName: 'Conflict',
  path: '/.reporting-...',
  body: {
    error: {
      type: 'version_conflict_engine_exception',
      reason: '[...]: version conflict, required seqNo [6124], primary term [1]. current document has seqNo [6125] and primary term [1]',
    },
  },
  statusCode: 409
}

These messages alone don’t indicate a problem. They show normal events that happen in a healthy system.

There are two primary causes of this error:

Create a Markdown visualization and then create a PDF report. If this succeeds, increase the xpack.reporting.queue.timeout setting. If the PDF report fails with "Max attempts reached," check your Kibana server settings.

Reporting using the Chromium browser relies on the Network Security Service libraries (NSS). Install the appropriate nss package for your distribution.

Chromium uses sandboxing techniques that are built on top of operating system primitives. The Linux sandbox depends on user namespaces, which were introduced with the 3.8 Linux kernel. However, many distributions don’t have user namespaces enabled by default, or they require the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability. If the sandbox is not explicitly disabled in Kibana, either based on OS detection or with the xpack.screenshotting.browser.chromium.disableSandbox setting, Chrome will try to enable the sandbox. If it fails due to OS or permissions restrictions, Chrome will crash during initialization.

Elastic recommends that you research the feasibility of enabling unprivileged user namespaces before disabling the sandbox. An exception is if you are running Kibana in Docker because the container runs in a user namespace with the built-in seccomp/bpf filters.

Kibana server logs have a lot of useful information for troubleshooting and understanding how things work. If you’re having any issues at all, the full logs from Reporting will be the first place to look. In kibana.yml:

logging.root.level: all

For more information about logging, see Kibana configuration settings.

The Chromium browser that Kibana launches on the server is driven by a NodeJS library for Chromium called Puppeteer. The Puppeteer library has its own command-line method to generate its own debug logs, which can sometimes be helpful, particularly to figure out if a problem is caused by Kibana or Chromium. See more at debugging tips.

Using Puppeteer’s debug method when launching Kibana would look like:

env DEBUG="puppeteer:*" ./bin/kibana

The internal DevTools protocol traffic will be logged via the debug module under the puppeteer namespace.

The Puppeteer logs are very verbose and could possibly contain sensitive information. Handle the generated output with care.

In Elastic Cloud, the Kibana instances that most configurations provide by default is for 1GB of RAM for the instance. That is enough for Kibana Reporting when the visualization or dashboard is relatively simple, such as a single pie chart or a dashboard with a few visualizations. However, certain visualization types incur more load than others. For example, a TSVB panel has a lot of network requests to render.

If the Kibana instance doesn’t have enough memory to run the report, the report fails with an error such as Error: Page crashed! In this case, try increasing the memory for the Kibana instance to 2GB.

Elastic Maps Service (EMS) is a service that hosts tile layers and vector shapes of administrative boundaries. If a report contains a map with a missing basemap layer or administrative boundary, the Kibana server does not have access to EMS. See Connect to Elastic Maps Service for information on how to connect your Kibana server to EMS.

Chromium is not embedded into Kibana for the Darwin (Mac OS) architecture. When running Kibana on Darwin, Reporting will download Chromium into the proper area of the Kibana installation path the first time the server starts. If the server does not have access to the Internet, you must download the Chromium browser and install it into the Kibana installation path.

When Kibana starts, it will automatically extract the browser from the zip file, and is then ready for PNG and PDF reports.