Making multiple kibana deployments easily distinguishable

[kovyrin]

The Problem

We have many internal Kibana deployments at Swiftype and it is getting very painful to work with them because it is literally impossible to distinguish them from each other: they all look exactly the same and there is nothing within the UI that we could use to make it possible to quickly distinguish between multiple deployments.

The issue is greatly magnified by the fact that we use ECE for managing the deployment and end up with dozens of meaningless URLs based on cluster ids.

Possible Solutions

There are a few changes we would love to see in Kibana to solve the issues described above (ordered by priority from our point of view):

1. Display cluster name (could just be the server.name value) somewhere on the page at all times. It should always be visible to the user (sidebar looks like a reasonably accessible place to put it, the same way the username is displayed there).

Something like this:

2. Show cluster name (could just be the server.name value) on the login screen, helping the user understand what Kibana cluster they are logging into.

Something like this:

3. Make it possible to change Favicon for a Kibana deployment, allowing users to distinguish some of their key Kibana deployments from the rest of the herd (this may allow ECE in the future to set a specific favicon on internal Kibana clusters like the logs and monitoring one).

4. And last, but probably one of the most effective solutions - allow users to easily change Kibana color scheme (Slack's solution to the issue is one of the most elegant I've seen).

[azasypkin]

2. Show cluster name (could just be the server.name value) on the login screen, helping the user understand what Kibana cluster they are logging into.

This option won't work for all the cases, you can log in, close tab, open tab again and you won't see login screen anymore since your cookie is still valid (not to mention SAML that doesn't have Kibana specific login screen at all).

[kovyrin]

@azasypkin Oh, I didn't mean this to be a solution to be used in isolation. My suggestion was to make sure, that when I do see a login screen, I could identify the cluster easily.

[azasypkin]

@azasypkin Oh, I didn't mean this to be a solution to be used in isolation. My suggestion was to make sure, that when I do see a login screen, I could identify the cluster easily.

Yeah, sure, it can be useful as an additional/secondary deployment "indicator" when basic authentication is used.

[AlonaNadler]

A similar request from a customer, the customer is using ECE and manage multiple clusters and kibana instances, currently, there is no indication once logged in to Kibana which Kibana/Elastic cluster you are on,
The customer is asking to have a name indicating which cluster is being used, similar to @kovyrin first suggestion

[epixa]

It'll be interesting to see to what extent spaces impacts this issue. They're not the same thing, and I could still see the need for this for certain deployments even when spaces is being used, but if different spaces are used for different Kibana installs, at least for some people the space name itself might help distinguish.

[kovyrin]

I could see the spaces idea being useful in some cases when people have a choice in the matter of kibana deployment. Unfortunately, ECE customers don't have that choice :-(