Kibana Alternatives

The only thing I know of would be Grafana. But that won't support ES until version 2.5. So currently you're going to have to make due with Kibana or manual labor.

EDIT

Grafana 2.5 has been released and features a ElasticSearch query editor.

I assume you are talking about Kibana 4 or 5. When this happens to me it usually means that the time filter is set to a period when there is no data for or documents do not have time stamps or the mapping of time stamp field is not set to 'date'. So the solution is to use Kibana 3 as your discovery panel. Here is a link to a fork that supports aggregations and Elasticsearch 2.x and 5.x.

https://github.com/immunochomik/kibana3

In Kibana 3 you can remove time filter completely so the time histogram will try to show you all the data in the index, also if there are no time stamps you can still look at data in terms panels and documents panels.

Another interesting alternative is redash, you can build dashboards combining many sources of data including Elasticsearch. Drawback is that you need to know how to write a query.

Open source options: Grafana, Redash

If you are open to commercial solutions, Knowi might be an option for more advanced needs (multi-index/multi-database joins, AI etc). See their ElasticSearch playground.