Kibana: Intermittent 406 with short URLs

[ceeeekay]

Kibana version: 5.2.0
Elasticsearch version: 5.2.0
Server OS version: Ubuntu 16.04.2
Browser version: Firefox 50.1.0
Browser OS version: Ubuntu 14.04.5
Original install method (e.g. download page, yum, from source, etc.): Apt
Description of the problem including expected versus actual behavior: Visiting a short URL sometimes produces a 406 error, rather than the expected dashboard.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Share and create shortened URL for Kibana dashboard
2. Visit shortened URL
3. Occasionally a shortened URL is created which produces this error:
   {"statusCode":406,"error":"Not Acceptable","message":"Short url target path must be in the format \"/app/{{appId}}\", found \"/\""}

I have only seen this error twice and am unable to reproduce it for this issue. However I did notice that although the error persists over time (days), as soon as a second short URL is created for the same dashboard, the error no longer occurs.

First occurred immediately after upgrading from 5.1.0 to 5.2.0 .

[macro]

I'm seeing this as well after upgrading from 4.4.2 to 4.6.4.

It seems target URL validation landed in the following commit:
https://github.com/elastic/kibana/commit/bc118d947428316f61381a262a844b7937941d50

However, this breaks older existing short URLs which seemed to have absolute URLs in the target URL.

This can be seen when looking at _type:url objects in the .kibana index.

[spalger]

This is also the error returned when a short url is not found, instead of a 404.

[ceeeekay]

Is there any update on this? Currently running 5.3.0 and it's become impossible to share links with people.

[stacey-gammon]

@ceeeekay Sounds like you are running into this issue: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/10951. There was an issue in 5.3.0 which broke the share urls, it will be fixed in 5.3.1.

[reembs]

This error occurs when Kibana gets an error while querying it's ES index for the short-url document. The true error is swallowed and a default value of "/" is returned when trying to get the target path for the short URL. In our case this was due to our ES using authentication which the server-side code failed to supply.

The problem is that short_url_lookup.js->getUrlDoc uses callWithRequest to access ES. callWithRequest tries to use the credentials passed to the request kibana got, but requests to /goto/{id} path do not require auth, and hence will be missing it in some cases.

Hacky workaround: I just changed getUrlDoc code to use callWithInternalUser instead. This bypasses the need for authentication. Works perfectly for us. Not sure, but maybe forcing auth on the goto path might be a more reasonable approach.