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Prepare for upgrades

Do not upgrade Elasticsearch, Kibana, Kubernetes, or managed infrastructure directly. Use only a version or maintenance action approved for the managed application.

Prepare

  1. Record the current Elasticsearch and Kibana versions.
  2. Review Elastic breaking changes and deprecations for the complete upgrade path.
  3. Check client, integration, plugin, and ingest-component compatibility.
  4. Resolve critical cluster-health and disk-capacity problems.
  5. Verify a recent successful snapshot and the restore plan.
  6. Pause unrelated configuration changes.
  7. Define validation, rollback, owners, and customer communications.

Elasticsearch does not support downgrading to an earlier version. Treat rollback as a service recovery decision, not as an ordinary package downgrade.

Validate after the managed upgrade

  • Confirm the reported Elasticsearch and Kibana versions.
  • Check cluster health and unassigned shards.
  • Test authentication and role mappings.
  • Test one representative indexing and search operation.
  • Open critical Kibana dashboards.
  • Confirm ingestion clients and snapshot policies are healthy.
  • Review deprecation or migration warnings.

Use Elastic upgrade preparation for current compatibility requirements. If no managed upgrade action is available, get support rather than changing infrastructure.