kibana 3 works with multiple versions. i have tried 1.4, 1.5 and 1.7. the release notes does not mention the exact version of elasticsearch compatibility. does it work with any version of elastic search 2.x ?? below is the release notes
3.1.1
3.1.2
3.1.3
It doesn't since they did some massive changes on elasticsearch 2.x. Some main query formats were changed and only on the newer Kibana versions contain the correct code.
You can see here the breaking changes they've made for elasticsearch query language(DSL)
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/breaking-changes-2.0.html
It is solved here: https://github.com/gigya/kibana/tree/3.0
Solved the transformation of the facets for Terms and Histogram.
Kibana 3 depends on the facets(https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-facets.html) feature. Facets were removed in the 2.0 release of Elasticsearch. Hence, Kibana 3 does not support Elasticsearch versions greater than 1.7.
This is mentioned in the kibana 3 documentation(https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/3.0/_introduction.html) but not in the release notes.
Also as Val mentioned in the comments kibana 3 is EOL since Nov 15th, 2015 - https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-end-of-life-eol-plan-for-kibana-3/102