Kibana Tutorial

Kibana is an open-source data visualization and examination tool. It is used for application monitoring and operational intelligence use cases. It provides powerful and easy-to-use features such as histograms, line graphs, pie charts, heat maps, and built-in geospatial support.

In this section, we have explained what is Kibana, Kibana functions, uses of Kibana, and features of Kibana.

Whether we're a consumer or an admin, Kibana provides three main functions to make our data actionable.

An open-source framework for visualisation. Using Kibana we can explore the Elasticsearch results, and create attractive dashboards and visualizations.
It is a user interface that manages the Elastic Stack. It manages the security settings, allocate user tasks, take snapshots, roll up data and many more. The Kibana User interface allows us to perform all these tasks.
A unified platform for solutions provided by Elastic. It is the hub for accessing these and other features, from log analytics to content discovery to SIEM.

Getting the data into Kibana

Kibana is intended to use Elasticsearch as a source of the data. We can say that Elasticsearch is like a data storage and processing engine, with Kibana sitting on top of it.

Kibana offers the following data collection options:

Kibana has built-in video tutorials to set up a data flow to Elasticsearch.
Connect a collection of sample data and take Kibana on a test drive without loading yourself.
Using file upload function, we can import static data.
Index the data with the REST APIs or application libraries into Elasticsearch.
Kibana uses an index template to tell which indices to explore in Elasticsearch.
In Kibana when we add any data or sample data, we get a free index sequence in it. After that, we can explore that index. We can also construct an index pattern in Management, if we load our own data.

Explore & query edit

Ready to immerse yourself in the data? We can explore our data with Discover, and scan for secret insights and relationships. Ask questions, then narrow the answers down to the data we like.

Visualization in Kibana

A visualization of data in any domain is worth a thousand log lines and in this case Kibana offers plenty of options so that we can showcase our results in very effective manner. When our data is best visualized, Lens allows us to move easily between forms of visualisation.

By using Kibana's Dashboard, we can gather all these features at one place until our visualizations is just the way we want it to be. From multiple viewpoints the dashboard in Kibana provides insights into our results.

The features that Kibana provides are:

The visualize feature helps us to view our data in different forms like line charts, bar graphs, pie charts, histograms and tables. Lens, the drag-and - drop GUI, is also there in the home menu. Visualize in Kibana supports the ability to add interactive controls to our dashboard, and also real-time filtering of dashboard information.
Canvas gives us the opportunity to present the data in a pixel-perfect report which is visually convincing. It also offers wow factor that is needed in order to impress our client or the one for whom we want data to be visualized.
Maps allow us to ask (and answer) specific questions about our data based on the location. Maps feature supports several layers and data sources, visualization of individual geo dots and shapes, and dynamic styling on the client side.
TSVB helps us in Kibana to combine an infinite number of aggregations to offer meaningful show of complex data so that it can be represented more beautifully. TSVB helps us to examine multiple index trends and to customize any aspect of our viewing. We can also opt own date format and colour, gradients, and turn our view between time series, metric, top N, gauge, and markdown easily with the help of Kibana.

Organize & secure edit

Do we want to share the goodness of Kibana with others or with teams? We can do that with Spaces in Kibana, that are designed to organize our visualizations, dashboards, and indices in a very proper manner. Just think of a space as our own mini Kibana installation. And that space will be separated from all other rooms, so we can adapt it to our unique needs without influencing others or without any interference.

It is the power and special feature of the Kibana.

We can also select which features inside what space we want to allow. Just shut it off.

With Kibana's security features we can take this all one step further, and monitor which users have access to each room. Kibana allows fine-grained controls, so we can offer read-only access to dashboards to a user in one room, but full access to all features of Kibana in another.

Manage all things Elastic Stackedit

Management in Kibana offers directed processes that are used to handle all Elastic Stack stuff like indexes, clusters, licenses, UI settings, index patterns and many more. If one need to test his indices on Elasticsearch or are functions and privileges set for users or Shifting to dark mode, for all of that Kibana has UIs build in itself.

Kibana will help us identify security vulnerabilities as a repository for Elastic's solutions, track performance and resolve our business needs. Using the computer code to weed out bottlenecks. Kibana does not limit or determine how we are exploring the data.

Audience

To learn Kibana, you must have the basic knowledge of data visualization like, graph, table, maps, etc. If you have interacted with any other data visualization tool, it will add more advantage.