Kibana - Capture, Analyze and Visualize Data

Kibana - Capture, Analyze and Visualize Data

About Kibana - Capture, Analyze and Visualize Data

So what is Kibana, and why should you take the time to learn it? Kibana is part of the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) and the Elastic Stack. It's often referred to as the window into Elasticsearch. With Kibana, you can visualize the data stored within an Elasticsearch cluster. This includes everything from running ad hoc queries, creating visualizations such as line charts and pie charts, and displaying data on dashboards. Kibana enables you to easily interact with your data, providing a much better experience than writing Elasticsearch queries. Slicing and dicing data is easy, and navigating between different datasets can be done without losing context. As such, Kibana is an excellent tool for data analysis, exploration, and investigation. Dashboards are a key feature, enabling us to provide ourselves and teams with overviews of relevant data. For instance, we could create a dashboard for a sales department, and another for software engineers.

Kibana is also commonly used for monitoring data, for instance in the context of observability. By using Kibana and the Elastic Stack for observability, you can gain insight into the performance of applications (APM), monitor service uptime, keep an eye on hardware and service utilization, etc. Apart from that, Kibana is also frequently used for security analysis and managing machine learning jobs.

Needless to say, Kibana is an incredibly powerful tool for visualizing, analyzing, and monitoring Elasticsearch data.