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Elastic Docs ›X-Pack for the Elastic Stack [5.3]

Release Notes

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Release Notes

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Release notes for all of the X-Pack components: X-Pack security, X-Pack monitoring, Watcher, X-Pack reporting, and X-Pack graph.

Change List

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5.3.3

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June 1, 2017

Bug Fixes

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Monitoring
  • Limited the indices stats being collected to just the ones that are needed to reduce the overhead of the lookup.

5.3.2

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April 27, 2017

Bug Fixes

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Watcher
  • Fixed resetting of acknowledgement status on unmet conditions.

5.3.1

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April 20, 2017

Enhancements

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Watcher
  • Parsing of comma separated email addresses, so you can use the {{#join}} tag to join an array of email addresses.

Bug Fixes

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Security
  • Fixed a problem in field level security that could result in users not seeing all the documents that they should.
Watcher
  • HTTP JSON parsing has been fixed when a response contains only a JSON array.
  • When watcher is disabled, the start up check on automatic index creation is now disabled as well.

5.3.0

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March 28, 2017

Breaking Changes

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Security
  • Unauthorized bulk request is rejected on individual bulk item basis instead of being rejected as an entire operation. In case of insufficient privileges, individual bulk item responses return security exception with 403 error code instead of top level bulk response returning security exception with 403 error code. The top level bulk response always returns with 200 status code.
  • create, index and delete index privileges can execute bulk action.
  • Usage of Netty 3 for transport (transport.type=security3) or HTTP (http.type=security3) is deprecated and will be removed in X-Pack 6.0.0. Instead, rely on the default implementations which are based on Netty 4.

Enhancements

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Watcher
  • A new dedicated action status called ACKNOWLEDGED has been introduced to easily find watches, that have been acknowledged by the user
  • Index Actions now support the ability to index using a dynamic _id field in the payload or constant doc_id parameter

Bug Fixes

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Monitoring
  • The list of Logstash nodes can now display more than 10 nodes.
  • Fixed the cluster summary rollups for Kibana and Logstash that appear in the Cluster Overview and Cluster Summary.
  • Logstash monitoring now has an Advanced tab that displays cgroup and persistent queue statistics.
Security
  • You no longer get a StatusLogger error when you run the certgen tool.
  • If you upgrade after reverting to a Basic license, you no longer get an error indicating that the realm cache could not be cleared.
  • Improved error handling in LDAP authentication. The most common symptom of this issue was an inability to authenticate using a second LDAP or Active Directory server.
Watcher
  • Trying to execute a non-existing watch now results in a correct HTTP 404 response
  • When using a search input or a search transform has been, groovy could be incorrectly set as default scripting language instead of painless
Security
  • Improved error handling in LDAP authentication. The most common symptom of this issue was an inability to authenticate using a second LDAP or Active Directory server.

5.2.2

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February 28, 2017

Bug Fixes

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Monitoring
  • Auto-Refresh can be set to Off without adverse effects.

5.2.1

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February 14, 2017

Enhancements

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Monitoring
  • You can now specify multiple Elasticsearch hosts as an array when configuring the xpack.monitoring.elasticsearch.url.
  • The Clusters table now includes a column for Logstash.
Security
  • Added TRACE logging for LDAP traffic.

5.2.0

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January 31, 2017

Breaking Changes

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Security
  • The validation of security related settings has been tightened. Elasticsearch will refuse to start if it detects incorrect configuration of security realms or SSL/TLS.

New Features

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Monitoring
  • You can now monitor Logstash nodes.
  • If you’re running Elasticsearch in containers, you can now monitor a container’s utilization metrics that are reported from each Elasticsearch instance.

Enhancements

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Monitoring
Security
  • Renamed the kibana role to kibana_system. A backwards compatibility layer is provided so that kibana access still works properly during rolling upgrades.
Watcher
  • Watches can now be deleted even if the license is expired.
  • A deprecation warning is logged if an executed watch contains unencoded URLs. Starting in 6.0, all URLs in http and webhook actions must be properly encoded.

Bug Fixes

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Reporting
  • Now correctly uses the dashboard state when rendering visualizations. Previously, if you saved a change to a dashboard and then generated a report, the report would not reflect the change.
Security
  • LDAP and AD realms now obey the ssl.verification_mode setting. The hostname_verification setting is deprecated.
  • When using a Gold license, the role management UI now identifies any roles that are disabled because they rely on the document or field level security features available during the trial period and with a Platinum license. You cannot modify disabled roles, but you can view and delete them.
Watcher
  • The search input now correctly handles the extract parameter.

Bug Fixes

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Security
  • Fixed a problem where realm_authentication_failed audit events were being recorded as authentication_failed when auditing was logged to an index.
  • If a destructive operations check fails, stop execution of the index operation.
  • Disable roles with document and field level security if the trial period is over and a Gold license is installed. (DLS/FLS are only available with a Platinum license.)
  • Looking up the groups an LDAP user belongs to now returns the correct information. This was preventing users from being correctly mapped to roles in some cases.
Watcher
  • Index action: Ensure that a failed index request, which is part of a bulk request via the _doc array is logged correctly as success or (partial) failure.

5.1.1

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December 8, 2016

Enhancements

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Watcher
  • You can now specify a proxy in HipChat, PagerDuty, and Slack actions.
Monitoring
  • Combined advnanced node charts.

New Features

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Watcher
  • Added a new jira action that allows to create Jira issues using Watcher.

Bug Fixes

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Monitoring
  • Improved behavior of the monitoring charts' crosshair.
  • Temporarily removed monitoring chart tooltip.
  • Fixed monitoring chart legend labels.
  • Properly handle 404 responses from Elasticsearch.
Reporting
  • Fixed an unhandled error when extracting the PhantomJS archive that was causing the Kibana server to stall on start up.
  • Updated the phantomjs.exe path for Windows.
Security
  • Fixed a problem where the search template endpoint threw an error when used against all indices or a wildcard expression.
  • Kibana no longer crashses when a basic license is installed.
Watcher
  • An invalid HTTP response is now correctly marked as a failure.
  • Ensure that watcher history does not contain secrets

5.1.0 (skipped)

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Version 5.1.0 doesn’t exist because, for a short period of time, the Elastic Yum and Apt repositories included unreleased binaries labeled 5.1.0. To avoid confusion and upgrade issues for the people that have installed these without realizing, we decided to skip the 5.1.0 version and release 5.1.1 instead.

5.0.2

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November 29, 2016

Bug Fixes

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Monitoring
  • Add support for custom headers in the monitoring connection and make phone home always return 200.
Security
  • Allow reads of native users and roles when the template version hasn’t been updated to match the current version. This prevents failures from occurring during rolling upgrades.
  • Retain all user information for run as requests.
  • Prevent unknown run as users from executing any APIs. Previously, if an authenticated user with run as permission attempted to run as an unknown user, the unknown user was assigned the default and anonymous roles if they were enabled.
  • If an exception is thrown when resolving the index in an index request, it is now recorded as accessDenied in the audit-trail. Previously, no entry was recorded in the audit trail.

5.0.1

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November 15, 2016

Bug Fixes

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Graph
  • Fixed the license check so Graph doesn’t throw an undefined error when Security is disabled and you try to load a workspace URL.
Monitoring
  • Show Replica Count not Replication Factor in Overview.
  • A non-aliased Monitoring index can now be always be created for the current day when upgrading from Marvel.
  • Duplicate shards no longer appear in the shard allocation table.
  • The Kibana Cluster Summary now always shows the last-known status.
  • Kibana now makes sure Monitoring is enabled before attempting to send stats.
Security
  • Security can no longer pollute the thread context with incorrect users, which could cause failures during the discovery process.
  • Security now honors the action.destructive_requires_name setting and prevents users from deleting indices with wildcards if it is set to true.
  • Made changes to preserve the context when performing internal actions. This ensures subsequent actions are performed as the correct user.
  • Files generated by the certgen tool now have permissions set to 600 so they aren’t world-readable.
  • The Security UI no longer hangs when you configure field-level security when adding a role.
  • When running with a Basic License, the login dialog is no longer displayed and no Security elements are visible in Kibana.
  • The last sub URL of each Kibana app is no longer cached between sessions. This means that when a different user logs in, they are longer redirected to the URLs the previous user viewed last.
Watcher
  • Chain input: An exception is now thrown if the inputs in the chain are specified with a data structure that does not preserve the input order. The inputs in a chain must be specified as array elements to guarantee the order in which the inputs are processed. (JSON does not guarantee the order of arbitrary objects.)
  • Watch history template: Removed the unused Watcher plugin version.
  • Email output: Fixed an error that prevented emails from being sennt when localhost could not be resolved.

5.0.0

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October 26, 2016

Breaking Changes

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X-Pack
  • All settings have been updated to use the xpack prefix. For more information, see Migrating to X-Pack.
Licensing
  • Licensing endpoint has been renamed from /_license to /_xpack/license.
Monitoring
  • http exporters no longer honor the keep_alive setting as this is handled by the low-level REST Client.
  • All monitoring.agent.* settings have been changed to more closely match other monitoring collection settings: xpack.monitoring.collection.* and xpack.monitoring.exporters.*.
  • The Index page’s Lucene Memory chart was replaced with an Index Memory chart, which includes a superset of the information. Fielddata, which has become a significantly less common issue, has been rolled into the Index Memory chart.
  • To use an external monitoring cluster to monitor an Elasticsearch 5.0 cluster, you must run Elasticsearch 5.0 on the monitoring cluster. For more information about external monitoring clusters, see Setting up a Separate Monitoring Cluster.
  • All settings have been updated to use the xpack.monitoring prefix. For more information, see Migrating to X-Pack.
Reporting
  • Reporting encryption keys configured in kibana.yml must now be at least 32 characters.
Security
  • Security encryption keys configured in kibana.yml must now be at least 32 characters.
  • The SSL configuration settings have been changed to use an easier to use format that also supports PEM files.
  • Removed the files.users and files.users_roles settings from the file realm.
  • Removed the setting that allowed for a custom roles.yml file location to be specified. The roles.yml file must always be in the CONF_DIR/x-pack directory.
  • Removed the setting that allowed for a custom system key location to be defined. The system_key file must always be in the CONF_DIR/x-pack directory.
  • The logfile output for auditing no longer uses the log level to determine which events to log. The events are now controlled in the same way as the index output.
  • Changed the syntax for field-level-security. Roles stored in the old format in native or file based realm will continue to work but new roles must use the new format.
  • The esusers realm has been renamed to file and the esusers command line tool has been renamed to users. Note that the User and Role APIs are the preferred way to manage internal users.
  • Elasticsearch enables HTTP compression by default now. To mitigate potential security risks like the BREACH attack, X-Pack security disables compression if HTTPS is enabled. If Elasticsearch should compress HTTPS traffic, please explicitly set http.compression to true in ‘elasticsearch.yml’.
  • You must specify all required values to override the global SSL configuration in a profile. If any values are omitted, the entire configuration falls back to the global settings, xpack.security.ssl.*.
  • The skipSslCheck and useUnsafeSessions for Kibana have been replaced by xpack.security.secureCookies in kibana.yml. SSL is now disabled by default. You can start Kibana without making any changes to kibana.yml after you install X-Pack. Do not deploy to production without enabling SSL/TLS encryption!
  • A default role is now applied to all users, including anonymous users. The default role enables users to access the authenticate endpoint, change their own passwords, and get information about themselves.
  • All settings have been updated to use the xpack.security prefix. For more information, see Migrating to X-Pack.
Watcher
  • The force parameter of the Delete Watch Action has been removed.
  • The use of the _timestamp field for the execution time has been removed. The user now needs to set this explicitly in the index action.
  • The _xpack/watcher/_start, _xpack/watcher/_restart, and _xpack/watcher/_stop REST endpoints require POST actions instead of PUT actions. The deprecated _watcher/_start, _watcher/_restart, and _watcher/_stop endpoints still allow PUT.
  • Watch history now uses a versioned template. The index names also changed and contain this version. So instead of .watch_history_2016.02.03 the new index name is .watcher-history-1-2016.02.03, where 1 is the current version. If you are using X-Pack security, this might require you to change roles/permissions because of the different index names! The old index template named watch_history can safely be deleted. However, it does not interfere with the new index template.
  • The setting that enables scripting only for Watcher has been renamed from script.engine.groovy.inline.elasticsearch-watcher_watch to script.engine.groovy.inline.xpack_watch.
  • Elasticsearch has several breaking changes in the query DSL, including that search_type=count is no longer supported. Check to see if your watches use this search type and upgrade them to use size: 0 in the request body as needed. For more information about breaking changes including search changes, see breaking changes section in Elasticsearch.
  • All account SMTP timeouts (smtp.timeout, smtp.connection_timeout and smtp.write_timeout) now require a time value instead of a number in milliseconds.
  • The notification settings for PagerDuty, Slack, HipChat, and email have been moved from watcher.actions to xpack.notification. You need to update your Elasticsearch configuration accordingly.
  • All watcher endpoints have been renamed from /_watcher/XYZ to /_xpack/watcher/XYZ. You might need to fix this in external scripts as well as in your watches.
  • The notification settings have been stripped of their service part. So watcher.actions.slack.service.default_account becomes xpack.notification.slack.default_account
  • The setting watcher.shield.encrypt_sensitive_data has been renamed to xpack.watcher.encrypt_sensitive_data

New Features

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Monitoring
  • Added new node resolver, uuid, to the Monitoring UI configuration and made it the default. Starting with Elasticsearch 5.0, instances of Elasticsearch create a persistent UUID that remains the same across restarts unless the data directory is deleted. If the data directory is deleted, the instance a new UUID on start up.
  • Latencies calculated against totals use derivatives to get the rate of change. If any derivative is negative, then that time bucket is ignored and left blank on the latency chart. Values that are negative indicate that the underlying total shrank, which means that the data is skewed and showing the result is misleading (for example, due to nodes restarting).
  • Added Segment Count memory chart to the Index page.
Security
  • Support for forest wide authentication in the Active Directory Realm.
  • The default LDAP group search filter now includes posixGroup groups.
  • LDAP user search can now use un-pooled connections.
Watcher
  • Added support for accessing the HTTP status code of a response in the HTTP input through ctx.payload._status_code.
  • The new REST endpoint for acknowledging certain actions of a watch is _xpack/watcher/watch/{watch_id}/_ack/{action_id}. The old notation was watcher/watch/{watch_id}/{action_id}/_ack, which will be removed in future releases.

Enhancements

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Graph
  • Added ability to save Graph workspaces
  • Added ability to drill-down on Graph selections using other Kibana visualizations
  • In the Graph UI, you can now use an index pattern such as logstash-* to select multiple time-based indices instead of a single index.
Monitoring
  • Added dots for all points on charts.
  • Added the ability to highlight points by hovering close to them. The highlighted point, and those from other series at the X-position, are what are displayed in the legend.
  • Added a monitoring ingest pipeline so that future releases will be compatible even if backward incompatible changes are made. This is enabled by default, but can be disabled by setting use_ingest to false at the exporter level (for example, xpack.monitoring.exporters.my_exporter.use_ingest: false).
  • Added the ability for HTTP exporters to send arbitrary HTTP headers along with requests. This allows the HTTP exporter to be used with proxies to route monitoring data more dynamically, if necessary. This can be used by supplying name-value pairs at the exporter level (for example, xpack.monitoring.exporters.my_exporter.headers.X-My-Header: abc123).
  • Rewrote the HTTP exporter to use the low-level REST Client and better pool connections. This reduces the resources used for both networking and parsing.
  • Added Kibana instance monitoring as part of the same Elastic Cluster.
  • Added experimental charts to be used while monitoring Kibana instances.
  • Added breadcrumbs to allow simpler navigation between monitoring pages.
  • Simplified the Indices tab to remove charts that already appeared on the Overview page so that indices are more accessible.
  • Simplified overall status handling so that it is clearer what the status of the current item is (e.g., index view gives index status).
  • Added index memory graph to the Node page so that the cost of open indices can be determined more accurately.
  • Added the total indexing rate alongside the primary indexing rate. Total includes both primaries and replicas.
  • Added color to all charts.
  • Added units to all chart titles.
  • Added the internals to support monitoring Kibana instances.
  • Improved the display of values in the legend.
  • Shortened the welcome message.
Security
  • Native users and roles can now be used on tribe nodes.
  • Added the ability to disable native and reserved users.
  • Added ability to define exclusions for fields in field level security.
  • Added built-in roles for reporting users, monitoring users, remote monitoring agents, and users of the Kibana ingest feature.
  • Auditing supports an authentication_success event that is output after authentication. This event can output the body of the request, so in combination with the authentication_failed event all request bodies can be audited.
  • Added a X-Pack specific transport client, PreBuiltXPackTransportClient, that provides an easy way to use the transport client with X-Pack and other modules of Elasticsearch such as reindex.
  • Auditing now de-duplicates the names of indices when logging.
  • Document and Field Level Security can be used with realtime requests.
  • The certgen tool no longer generates file names that would result in hidden files and now offers an option to specify the validity time of the generated certificates.
  • Added an ingest_admin role that grants the permissions requried to use the ingest feature in Kibana.
  • New elastic and kibana built-in users.
  • New superuser and transport_client built-in roles.
  • Added a password API to enable administrators and users to reset and change passwords.
  • Added a built-in kibana_user role that grants the minimum set of privileges needed to use Kibana.
  • Default anonymous username changed to _anonymous (used to be _es_anonymous_user)
Watcher
  • Allow use of inline attachments in emails, so that desktop clients can display attachments like images embedded in emails.
  • The HTTP headers of a response are now part of the payload and can be accessed via ctx.payload._headers
  • Individual actions now support conditions. This is useful when a single watch contains multiple actions—​specific actions can fire based on the current context.
  • Watches can now be modified or deleted while they are running, which is especially useful for long running watches

Bug Fixes

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Security
  • Updated document level security to support preventing requests that use scripts or now() from being cached.
Watcher
  • The watch version is now ignored when deleting a watch.

X-Plugins Release Notes (Pre-5.0)

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