Stacey Gammon

Searching for and deleting Kibana saved objects using Dev Tools

May 05, 2020

Searching for and deleting new Saved Object types in Kibana using Dev Tools

Setup

To go through this tutorial with me, you’ll need to have a local development setup of Kibana locally. You can read this Contributing guide to get you started, then run Kibana locally using:

yarn start --run-examples

There is no specific example plugin for this, but the Embeddable Examples includes code that registers a new saved object type. Visit the Embeddable Explorer app once and it’ll add a new Todo Saved Object.

Walk through

Often times developing plugins in Kibana means creating new saved object types. These types do not get automatically added to the Saved Object Management section:

no saved object in management

Even if they do, not all saved object types support the inpsect action. Dashboard is one that does so you can see all the fields of a particular instance of a Saved Object:

inspect saved object management

Dev tools can be your friend here, to view the raw data backing a saved object, and also to do some clean up. You can do things like:

Search by type

GET .kibana*/_search
{
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "type": "todo"
    }
  }
}

Returns:

{
  "took" : 0,
  "timed_out" : false,
  "_shards" : {
    "total" : 4,
    "successful" : 4,
    "skipped" : 0,
    "failed" : 0
  },
  "hits" : {
    "total" : {
      "value" : 1,
      "relation" : "eq"
    },
    "max_score" : 4.0488815,
    "hits" : [
      {
        "_index" : ".kibana_2",
        "_id" : "todo:sample-todo-saved-object",
        "_score" : 4.0488815,
        "_source" : {
          "todo" : {
            "task" : "Take the garbage out",
            "title" : "Garbage",
            "icon" : "trash"
          },
          "type" : "todo",
          "references" : [ ],
          "updated_at" : "2020-05-05T17:47:40.513Z"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

Search by title

GET .kibana*/_search
{
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "todo.title": "Garbage"
    }
  }
}

Or use a wildcard:

GET .kibana*/_search
{
  "query": {
    "wildcard": {
      "todo.title": "Garb*"
    }
  }
}

Delete by type

POST /.kibana*/_delete_by_query
{
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "type": "visualization"
    }
  }
}

Delete by title

POST /.kibana*/_delete_by_query
{
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "todo.title": "Garbage"
    }
  }
}

Happy developing!