How to disable Kibana telemetry

Disabling Kibana telemetry stops anonymous usage collection from being sent outside the environment, which helps meet compliance requirements and reduces unexpected outbound traffic from production networks.

Kibana telemetry (Usage Collection) is controlled by the telemetry settings, which determine whether Kibana reports feature and cluster statistics to Elastic. Applying the settings in kibana.yml enforces the behavior for the whole Kibana instance, regardless of individual user preferences in the web UI.

Package installs on Linux typically load configuration from /etc/kibana/kibana.yml and require a service restart to apply changes. YAML formatting matters, and invalid configuration can prevent Kibana from starting until the file is corrected.

1. Set the telemetry opt-out keys in /etc/kibana/kibana.yml.

   telemetry.optIn: false
   telemetry.allowChangingOptInStatus: false

   Invalid YAML (bad indentation or duplicate keys) can prevent Kibana from starting.

2. Restart the Kibana service to apply the telemetry change.

   $ sudo systemctl restart kibana

   Restarting Kibana interrupts access to the web interface until the service is back online.

   Related: How to manage the Kibana service with systemctl in Linux

3. Check the Kibana service status for an active (running) state after the restart.

   $ sudo systemctl status kibana --no-pager
   ● kibana.service - Kibana
        Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/kibana.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
        Active: active (running) since Mon 2026-01-05 09:22:41 UTC; 12s ago
   ##### snipped #####

   Related: How to manage the Kibana service with systemctl in Linux

4. Confirm the telemetry settings are present in /etc/kibana/kibana.yml.

   $ sudo rg -n "telemetry\.(optIn|allowChangingOptInStatus)" /etc/kibana/kibana.yml
   117:telemetry.optIn: false
   118:telemetry.allowChangingOptInStatus: false

   Use grep -n instead of rg when ripgrep is not installed.