Kibana: an overview

What is Kibana?

Kibana is a free and open frontend application that sits on top of the Elastic Stack, giving quest and information perception abilities for the information listed in Elasticsearch. Normally known as the outlining apparatus for the Elastic Stack (recently alluded to as the ELK Stack later Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana), Kibana additionally goes about as the UI for checking, making due, and getting an Elastic Stack group — just as the brought together center for worked in arrangements created on the Elastic Stack. Created in 2013 from inside the Elasticsearch people group, Kibana has developed to turn into the window into the Elastic Stack itself, offering an entryway for clients and organizations.

Features of Kibana

Kibana offers its users the following features −

Visualization

Kibana has a lot of ways to visualize data easily. 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 the 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.

Plugins

You can add third-party plugins to add some new visualization or also other UI addition in Kibana.

Coordinate and Region Maps

A coordinate and region map in Kibana helps to show the visualization on the geographical map giving a realistic view of the data.

Timeline

The timeline also called the timeline is yet another visualization tool that is mainly used for time-based data analysis. To work with the timeline, we need to use simple expression language which helps us connect to the index and also perform calculations on the data to obtain the results we need. It helps more in comparison of data to the previous cycle in terms of the week, month, etc.

Canvas

Canvas is yet another powerful feature in Kibana. Using canvas visualization, you can represent your data in different color combinations, shapes, texts, multiple pages called as wa workplace.

Advantages of Kibana

Kibana offers the following advantages to its users −

• Contains an open-source browser-based visualization tool mainly used to analyze a large volume of logs in the form of a line graph, bar graph, pie charts, heat maps, etc.
• Simple and easy for beginners to understand.
• Ease of conversion of visualization and dashboard into reports.
• Canvas visualization help to analyze complex data easily.
• Timeline visualization in Kibana helps to compare data backward to understand the performance better.

Disadvantages of Kibana

• Adding plugins to Kibana can be very tedious if there is a vera sion mismatch.
• You tend to face issues when you want to upgrade from an older version to a new one.

Kibana benefits

INTERACTIVE CHARTS

Kibana offers intuitive charts and reports that you can use to interactively navigate through large amounts of log data. You can dynamically drag time windows, zoom in and out of specific data subsets, and drill down on reports to extract actionable insights from your data.

MAPPING SUPPORT

Kibana comes with powerful geospatial capabilities so you can seamlessly layer in geographical information on top of your data and visualize results on maps.

PRE-BUILT AGGREGATIONS AND FILTERS

Using Kibana’s pre-built aggregations and filters, you can run a variety of analytics like histograms, top-N queries, and trends with just a few clicks.

EASILY ACCESSIBLE DASHBOARDS

You can easily set up dashboards and reports and share them with others. All you need is a browser to view and explore the data.