Elasticsearch is still initializing the kibana index

the curl -XDELETE http://localhost:9200/.kibana command works fine, however you lose all your Kibana settings (indexes, graphs, dashboards); by just querying the index I've solved the problem, without losing my data. For example:

curl -s http://localhost:9200/.kibana/_recovery?pretty
curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/.kibana/_settings' -d '
{
    "index" : {
        "number_of_replicas" : 0
    }
}'

Then start Kibana, it should work.

Gael Le Moellic

Warning: Removing .kibana index will make you lose all your kibana settings (indexes, graphs, dashboards)

This behavior is sometimes caused by an existing .kibana index. Kindly delete the .kibana index in elasticsearch using following command:

curl -XDELETE http://localhost:9200/.kibana

After deleting the index, restart Kibana.

If the problem still persists, and you are willing to lose any existing data, you can try deleting all indexes using following command:

curl -XDELETE http://localhost:9200/*

Followed by restarting Kibana.

Note: localhost:9200 is the elasticsearch server's host:port, which may be different in your case.

Sometimes you need to wait few minutes after restarting ES.
That can be also connected with low disk space.
Observed on AWS t2.small machine with ELK stack.