Wilson Mar bio photo

Wilson Mar

Hello!

Calendar YouTube Github

LinkedIn

Show all the numbers in a dashboard

US (English)   Norsk (Norwegian)   Español (Spanish)   Français (French)   Deutsch (German)   Italiano   Português   Estonian   اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ (Egypt Arabic)   Napali   中文 (简体) Chinese (Simplified)   日本語 Japanese   한국어 Korean

Overview

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.

  1. 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”.

  2. 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

  3. 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.

  1. Be in the Kibana directory to download and install the Sense app:

  2. 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.

  3. Start Kibana:

    ./bin/kibana

    On Windows:

    bin\kibana.bat

  4. 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

  1. Navigate into folder /etc/kibana to edit file configuration.yml.

  2. For the server.host: settting, replace localhost with 192.168.0.16 or whatever it should be.

  3. For the server.name: settting, replace your-hostname with your name.

  4. For the elasticsearch.url: settting, replace http://localhost:9200 with the IP and port defined.

  5. Save the file.

  6. Start the server:

    service kibana start

  7. View the landing page at Kibana’s default port 5601:

    http://192.168.0.15:5601

    The default “index patterns” screen should appear.

    elk-kibana-created-650x358-78550

  8. 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

More

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

  1. Elastic Stack ecosystem of people, websites, tutorials
  2. Elastic Stack architecture and installation
  3. Elastic Scaling (the database engine)
  4. Elastic Query (via REST API)
  5. Elastic Kibana (the visualization engine, like Grafana)
  6. Elastic Logstash to assemble and filter data from Beats
  7. Elastic Beats to collect data from servers