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Kibana 8.18.1

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The 8.18.1 release contains fixes for potential security vulnerabilities. See our security advisory for more details.

The 8.18.1 release includes the following known issues, enhancements and fixes.

Known issues

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PDF and PNG reports time out and fail with an invalid header error if server.protocol is set to http2

Details
If you’ve changed the server.protocol value to http2, PDF and PNG reports will fail when you export them from the dashboard, visualization, or Canvas workpad that you’re generating a report for.

Workaround
To temporarily resolve the issue, set server.protocol to http1.

Resolved
This issue is resolved in 8.17.9, 8.18.4, 8.19.0 and later.

Errors in rule executions occur when maintenance windows have filters.

Details
Errors occur when rules run during an active maintenance window that has filters and a matching rule category.

Workaround
Remove any filters added to the active maintenance window.

Resolved
This issue is resolved in 8.18.3.

Observability AI assistant Knowledge Base entries with empty text can lead to Kibana OOM or restarts.

Details
The semantic text migration can cause excessive traffic to a cluster and might eventually cause the Kibana instance to crash due to OOM, together with increase of requests to Elasticsearch & ML nodes.

The problem can occur when there is one or more empty text Knowledge Base documents.

The migration script does not handle this scenario and will indefinitely update the same document.

Because the document update involves semantic_text an ML node is kept warm further increasing the costs.

The issue involves semantic_text field type (and thus the semantic_text migration which is causing this issue), introduced in the knowledge base feature in 8.17.

Workaround

  1. Pause the Kibana instance if possible. If not possible, skip this step.
  2. Run a dry run query to identify if you have empty Knowledge Base documents. If you have at least 1 hit, you can be affected by the problem.

    GET .kibana-observability-ai-assistant-kb/_search
    {
      "query": {
        "bool": {
          "must": [{ "exists": { "field": "text" }}],
          "must_not": [ { "wildcard": { "text": "*" } }
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  3. Execute the deletion. For extra safety, you might want to trigger a snapshot before executing it.

    POST .kibana-observability-ai-assistant-kb/_delete_by_query
    {
      "query": {
        "bool": {
          "must": [{ "exists": { "field": "text" }}],
          "must_not": [ { "wildcard": { "text": "*" } }
          ]
        }
      }
    }

For more information, check:

Observability AI assistant gets stuck in a loop when attempting to call the execute_connector function.

Details
The Observability AI assistant gets stuck in a loop when calling the execute_connector function. Instead of completing queries, it times out with the error message Failed to parse function call arguments when converting messages for inference: SyntaxError: Unexpected non-whitespace character after JSON at position 72 and Error: Tool call arguments for execute_connector (...) were invalid.

Observability AI Assistant - Elastic Managed LLM may be automatically selected as default connector

Details
The Elastic Managed LLM may be automatically selected as your default connector because of existing connector selection logic. This can occur if you had not previously specified a connector for any of the following reasons:

  • You only had one connector available and it was always automatically picked for your conversations.
  • You had multiple connectors available but didn’t make a specific selection and used the automatically picked connector for your conversations.
  • You previously selected a connector but cleared your browser’s local storage or switched browsers or devices.

And:

  • All of your existing connector names come after the “Elastic Managed LLM connector" when sorted alphabetically.

For more information, check #2088

Enhancements

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Elastic Security solution
For the Elastic Security 8.18.1 release information, refer to Elastic Security Solution Release Notes.

Fixes

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Dashboards and Visualizations
  • Syncs the dashboard ES|QL query and filters with the corresponding visualization query in Lens (#218997).
  • Correctly formats keywords in metric visualizations (#218233).
  • When exploring a dashboard, the request inspector now shows the correct request and response in any successful scenario (#216519).
Discover
  • Fixes incorrect behavior for requests on fields where the Allow hidden and system indices (allow_hidden) option of the data view could be ignored (#217628).
  • Fixes the result of the Generate CSV report action for ES|QL panels (#216325).
Elastic Observability Solution
  • Prevents unnecessary suggestion requests when interacting with inputs on the APM Custom Links page (#218927).
  • Filters out null values from sourceDataStreams (#218772).
  • Fixes a bug with navigating to the Search Connectors tab in the AI Assistant Settings (#217749).
  • Improves aria-label attributes for correlations (#217512).
Elastic Security solution
For the Elastic Security 8.18.1 release information, refer to Elastic Security Solution Release Notes.
Kibana platform
  • Fixes broken icons in integrations coming from the Home plugin (#219206).
Kibana security
  • Removes check for unused connector role (#219358).
Machine Learning
  • Fixes error when switching Service providers in the Inference Endpoint flyout (#219020).
  • Corrects quotes in ES|QL queries for function arguments (#217680).