How do you export/import "index-pattern" types in Kibana

Question

Kibana 4.3 has great features for importing/exporting dashboards, searches, and visualizations. However, the related index-patterns are not contained in the the generated export.json file. When importing an export.json file into another kibana index, Kibana reports errors Could not locate that index-pattern-field (id: <index-pattern name>).

How do you migrate kibana's index-patterns from one Elasticsearch instance to another?

Thanks,

Nathan

Answer 1

From the official documentation (emphasis added)

Exported dashboards do not include their associated index patterns. Re-create the index patterns manually before importing saved dashboards to a Kibana instance running on another Elasticsearch cluster.

Since index patterns are saved in the .kibana index as well like anything else, what you can do instead of having to recreate them manually, is to save them using an adhoc tool, such as (e.g.) elasticdump, like this:

elasticdump \
  --input=http://host1:9200/.kibana \
  --input-index=.kibana/index-pattern \
  --output=http://host2:9200/.kibana \
  --output-index=.kibana/index-pattern \
  --type=data

You could also use snapshot/restore on your .kibana index