[[production]]
== Using Kibana in a production environment

* <<configuring-kibana-shield>>
* <<csp-strict-mode>>
* <<enabling-ssl>>
* <<load-balancing>>

How you deploy Kibana largely depends on your use case. If you are the only user,
you can run Kibana on your local machine and configure it to point to whatever
Elasticsearch instance you want to interact with. Conversely, if you have a large
number of heavy Kibana users, you might need to load balance across multiple
Kibana instances that are all connected to the same Elasticsearch instance.

While Kibana isn't terribly resource intensive, we still recommend running Kibana
separate from  your Elasticsearch data or master nodes. To distribute Kibana
traffic across the nodes in your Elasticsearch cluster, you can run Kibana
and an Elasticsearch client node on the same machine. For more information, see
<<load-balancing, Load Balancing Across Multiple Elasticsearch Nodes>>.

[float]
[[configuring-kibana-shield]]
=== Using {stack} {security-features}

You can use {stack-ov}/elasticsearch-security.html[{stack} {security-features}] 
to control what {es} data users can access through Kibana.

When {security-features} are enabled, Kibana users have to log in. They need to
have the `kibana_user` role as well as access to the indices they
will be working with in Kibana.

If a user loads a Kibana dashboard that accesses data in an index that they
are not authorized to view, they get an error that indicates the index does
not exist. The {security-features} do not currently provide a way to control 
which users can load which dashboards.

For information about setting up Kibana users, see
{kibana-ref}/using-kibana-with-security.html[Configuring security in Kibana].

[float]
[[csp-strict-mode]]
=== Require Content Security Policy

Kibana uses a Content Security Policy to help prevent the browser from allowing
unsafe scripting, but older browsers will silently ignore this policy. If your
organization does not need to support Internet Explorer 11 or much older
versions of our other supported browsers, we recommend that you enable Kibana's
`strict` mode for content security policy, which will block access to Kibana
for any browser that does not enforce even a rudimentary set of CSP
protections.

To do this, set `csp.strict` to `true` in your `kibana.yml`:

--------
csp.strict: true
--------


[float]
[[enabling-ssl]]
=== Enabling SSL

See <<configuring-tls>>. 

[float]
[[load-balancing]]
=== Load Balancing Across Multiple Elasticsearch Nodes
If you have multiple nodes in your Elasticsearch cluster, the easiest way to distribute Kibana requests
across the nodes is to run an Elasticsearch _Coordinating only_ node on the same machine as Kibana.
Elasticsearch Coordinating only nodes are essentially smart load balancers that are part of the cluster. They
process incoming HTTP requests, redirect operations to the other nodes in the cluster as needed, and
gather and return the results. For more information, see
{ref}/modules-node.html[Node] in the Elasticsearch reference.

To use a local client node to load balance Kibana requests:

. Install Elasticsearch on the same machine as Kibana.
. Configure the node as a Coordinating only node. In `elasticsearch.yml`, set `node.data`, `node.master` and `node.ingest` to `false`:
+
--------
# 3. You want this node to be neither master nor data node nor ingest node, but
#    to act as a "search load balancer" (fetching data from nodes,
#    aggregating results, etc.)
#
node.master: false
node.data: false
node.ingest: false
--------
. Configure the client node to join your Elasticsearch cluster. In `elasticsearch.yml`, set the `cluster.name` to the
name of your cluster.
+
--------
cluster.name: "my_cluster"
--------
. Check your transport and HTTP host configs in `elasticsearch.yml` under `network.host` and `transport.host`. The `transport.host` needs to be on the network reachable to the cluster members, the `network.host` is the network for the HTTP connection for Kibana (localhost:9200 by default).
+
--------
network.host: localhost
http.port: 9200

# by default transport.host refers to network.host
transport.host: <external ip>
transport.tcp.port: 9300 - 9400
--------
. Make sure Kibana is configured to point to your local client node. In `kibana.yml`, the `elasticsearch.hosts` setting should be set to
`["localhost:9200"]`.
+
--------
# The Elasticsearch instance to use for all your queries.
elasticsearch.hosts: ["http://localhost:9200"]
--------
