Data sent from Logstash via elastic output plugin not showing in Kibana, but file output plugin works fine - what am I doing wrong?
Being unfamiliar with Kibana, I was not aware of the time constraint on data on the default search/display of just 15 minutes. The data coming in was timestamped (@timestamp key) via the 'date' plugin with the original open date, NOT the time of the, via TCP port to elastic, insertion event; thus, no data was showing and I had no idea that by default only the past 15 minutes of data based on @timestamp were displayed. If I had read the part about the time constraint I would have known. So I just adjusted the time to go back infinite years and saw my data.

So, if anyone else is having this problem, it's probably because you created a time-dependent index and have not clicked the 'time' button in the top right corner and changed the time frame.

This, my friends, is why you read the manual!