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.