Elastic Kibana setup

Show all the numbers in a dashboard

Overview

Install Kibana
Marvel plug-in
Install Sense Chrome AddOn
Kibana Configuration
Panel Types
Plug-ins
Tutorials and Videos
More

Kibana presents visualizations in a dashboard containing data from Elasticsearch databases.

Kibana was first built using Ruby with the Sinatra framework.

WARNING: Kibana 4 has a completely different approach to creating charts than Kibana 3.

Install Kibana

Kibana was originally written in JavaScript using NodeJs.

Manually install Kibana on Ubuntu:

wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-Key-elasticsearch | sudo apt-key add -OK

The response expected is just “OK”.
Update the installer:

echo “deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/5.x/apt stable main” | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-5.x.list deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/5.x/apt stable main
Update and install:

apt-get update && apt-get install kibana

Marvel plug-in

http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/marvel

plugin.bat -i elasticsearch/marvel/latest

In Windows Services, restart elasticsearch service.

Indexing request rate

Install Sense Chrome AddOn

Sense is a Kibana app that provides an interactive console for submitting requests to Elasticsearch directly from your browser.

Be in the Kibana directory to download and install the Sense app:
Install and run Sense by running the following command

./bin/kibana plugin –install elastic/sense

On Windows:

bin\kibana.bat plugin –install elastic/sense

Alternately, download Sense from https://download.elastic.co/elastic/sense/sense-latest.tar.gz to install it on an offline machine.
Start Kibana:

./bin/kibana

On Windows:

bin\kibana.bat
Open Sense your web browser by going to

http://localhost:5601/app/sense

Kibana Configuration

Kibana installs with its own Node.js server. It doesn’t use a web server.

A default config.js comes with the installer.

A single node is a master, data, and client nodes. A node specializes into data and client nodes.

### Edit configuration

Navigate into folder /etc/kibana to edit file configuration.yml.
For the server.host: settting, replace localhost with 192.168.0.16 or whatever it should be.
For the server.name: settting, replace your-hostname with your name.
For the elasticsearch.url: settting, replace http://localhost:9200 with the IP and port defined.
Save the file.
Start the server:

service kibana start
View the landing page at Kibana’s default port 5601:

http://192.168.0.15:5601

The default “index patterns” screen should appear.
Click the blue “Create” button.

Panel Types

Kibana is described as “general purpose” because it provides a rich pallette of visualizations it can display.

ELK stack became popular among server admins analyzing server logs.

bettermap (version 4 on)
column
goal
histogram
hits
map
sparklines
terms
text
trends

For example, Kibana can create a dashboard with these panes:

1) a heatmap to display Logstash-enhanced GeoIp data based on idgeo lookup

2) a line graph to display how many log hits (the higher a point, the more hits).

3) a pie chart to summarize the percentage of different error log levels.

Plug-ins

https://github.com/ommsolutions/kibana_ext_metrics_vis is a plugin for Kibana 5.0.0+ based on the core Metric-Plugin but outputs custom aggregates on metric-results by using custom formula and/or JavaScript.

Tutorials and Videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96og3aIgyrc&list=PLhLSfisesZIvA8ad1J2DSdLWnTPtzWSfI is a YouTube playlist by Product Manager and Solutions Architect Morgan Goeller presenting Kibana4
https://www.elastic.co/webinars/getting-started-kibana?baymax=default&elektra=docs&storm=top-video Kibana 101
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-kibana-dashboards-and-visualizations

This is one of a series on Elastic Stack and monitoring:

Wilson Mar