Kibana

A detailed guide for Kibana setup and management

Kibana is a free and open frontend application that sits on top of the Elastic Stack, providing search and data visualization capabilities for data indexed in Elasticsearch. Commonly known as the charting tool for the Elastic Stack. The core feature of Kibana is data querying & analysis. In addition, Kibana’s visualization features allow you to visualize data in alternate ways using heat maps, line graphs, histograms, pie charts, and geospatial support. With various methods, you can search the data stored in Elasticsearch for root cause diagnostics.

Features

  • Visualization: Kibana has a lot of ways to visualize data in an easy way. Some of the ones which are commonly used are vertical bar chart, horizontal bar chart, pie chart, line graph, heat map etc.
  • Dashboard: When we have the visualizations ready, all of them can be placed on one board – the Dashboard. Observing different sections together gives you a clear overall idea about what exactly is happening.
  • Dev Tools: You can work with your indexes using dev tools. Beginners can add dummy indexes from dev tools and also add, update, delete the data and use the indexes to create visualization.
  • Reports: All the data in the form of visualization and dashboard can be converted to reports (CSV format), embedded in the code or in the form of URLs to be shared with others.
  • Filters and Search query: You can make use of filters and search queries to get the required details for a particular input from a dashboard or visualization tool.

Architecture