Introduction To Kibana

What is Kibana?

Kibana is an open-source visualization tool designed to work with Elasticsearch. It allows you to search, view, and interact with data stored in Elasticsearch indices. You can easily perform complex data analysis and create beautiful visualizations and dashboards.

Installing Kibana

To install Kibana, you can follow these steps:

# Download and install Kibana

wget https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/kibana/kibana-7.10.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

tar -xzf kibana-7.10.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

cd kibana-7.10.0-linux-x86_64

./bin/kibana

After running the above commands, Kibana will be accessible at http://localhost:5601.

Connecting Kibana to Elasticsearch

For Kibana to work, it needs to connect to an Elasticsearch instance. By default, Kibana connects to Elasticsearch running on localhost:9200. If your Elasticsearch instance is running on a different host or port, you can update the kibana.yml configuration file:

# Open the kibana.yml file and set the elasticsearch.hosts property

nano config/kibana.yml

# Add or update the following line

elasticsearch.hosts: ["http://your-elasticsearch-host:9200"]

Creating an Index Pattern

To start using Kibana, you need to create an index pattern. This tells Kibana which Elasticsearch indices to explore. Follow these steps:

Go to the Kibana interface.
Click on "Management" in the sidebar.
Under "Kibana", click on "Index Patterns".
Click "Create index pattern".
Enter the name of the index you want to explore (e.g., logstash-*).
Click "Next step".
Select the time field (if applicable) and click "Create index pattern".

Creating Visualizations

Once you have created an index pattern, you can start creating visualizations:

Go to the Kibana interface.
Click on "Visualize" in the sidebar.
Click "Create new visualization".
Select the type of visualization you want to create (e.g., Line Chart, Bar Chart, Pie Chart).
Select the index pattern you created earlier.
Configure the visualization options and click "Save".

For example, to create a bar chart:

1. Select "Bar Chart" as the visualization type.

2. Choose the index pattern you created earlier.

3. In the "Y-Axis" section, select the metric (e.g., "Count").

4. In the "X-Axis" section, select the field you want to aggregate (e.g., "timestamp").

5. Click "Apply changes" to see the bar chart.

Creating Dashboards

Dashboards allow you to combine multiple visualizations in a single view. To create a dashboard:

Go to the Kibana interface.
Click on "Dashboard" in the sidebar.
Click "Create new dashboard".
Click "Add" to add visualizations to the dashboard.
Select the visualizations you want to add.
Arrange the visualizations as desired and click "Save".

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have provided a comprehensive introduction to Kibana. We covered what Kibana is, how to install it, connect it to Elasticsearch, create index patterns, visualizations, and dashboards. Kibana is a powerful tool that enables you to visualize and analyze your data with ease. Explore its many features to get the most out of your Elasticsearch data.