Fast mode samples a fraction of the data instead of scanning all of it. This release also brings click-to-filter for ES|QL charts, query-powered controls, and cleaner metric and bar chart layouts. Elasticsearch Query Language (ES|QL) STATS queries on Kibana dashboards now run up to 100x faster. ES|QL Fast mode, in general availability (GA) in Kibana 9. 5, samples a fraction of the data rather than scanning every row, and results stay within a 90% confidence interval. With Fast mode, ES|QL charts pick up click-to-filter and Discover drilldowns.
Plus, controls can pull their values from an ES|QL query, and metric and bar chart defaults are cleaner. This builds on the dashboard improvements shipped in 9. The Dashboards API and AI dashboards and Vega-Lite charts also go GA in this release. For common analytical tasks, like trend tracking, top-host identification, and capacity overviews, trading a small margin of accuracy for dramatically faster results is the right call, especially since not every question needs an exact answer. 4 introduced approximate ES|QL queries as a syntax-only command in technical preview.
5 makes approximation GA and adds Fast mode , a UI toggle in Dashboards and Discover that enables approximate ES|QL STATS queries without writing any query syntax. This makes Kibana one of the first tools to offer smart sampling with automatic extrapolation as a simple switch. Fast mode is an Enterprise-only feature and is off by default. Dashboard authors can save their preferred state with the dashboard, and individual queries can override the toggle with SET approximation=true or false inline.
When switched on, ES|QL STATS queries target a fixed sample size (defaulting to 1,000,000 rows for grouped aggregations and 100,000 rows otherwise) rather than scanning the full dataset. Benchmarks show heavy aggregations running up to 100x faster on large datasets, with results that are typically highly accurate, defaulting to a 90% confidence interval. Approximation only applies to STATS commands where results can remain accurate.