Kibana

Kibana includes data analysis and observability.

Kibana works with Elastic Search documents, so you need basics of documents, mappings, aggregations.

What is Kibana ?

Kibana is an open source user interface that is used to visualize and analyze Elastic search data. The interface is accessible through a browser, and kibana ships with a built-in web server. The Kibana server communicate with Elasticsearch cluster to retrieve its data. Kibana also stores all of its data within Elasticsearch indices. This is user friendly, because we don’t have to manage a database with this data and things such as backups. If we loose the server on which kibana is running, we still have all of our data within our Elasticsearch cluster, and we can continue where we left off on a new instance.

What can we do with kibana ?

We can build visualization such as Pie charts, Bar charts, maps, heat maps, gauges, tag clouds etc. Generally, these visualizations make use of Elasticsearch aggregations and build dashboard on our data.

We can show data using kibana in different format like, PDF, PNG,CSV and links.

We can setup alert within kibana to be notified when certain criteria is fulfilled. For instance, we want to be alerted if there is a sudden increase in internal server errors on our website. or if the CPU usage of a server exceeds 85%. Each alert is based on data within an Elasticsearch index. We can notify alert in number of ways such as email, Slack or Webhooks.