The development of Big Data has pushed the creation of a wide variety of tools that facilitate the task of highlighting and studying the value of data. For example, Elasticsearch and Kibana belong to this large ecosystem of languages, tools, and systems for exploring data and deriving relevant insights.
Kibana is among the most popular data visualization tools. That’s why it’s such an important component for data processing in Elasticsearch.
In this article, we will share with you everything you need to know about Kibana, including how it works in Elasticsearch through its most representative features.
What is Kibana?
Kibana is an open-source data visualization and exploration tool from Elastic (under the Apache version 2 license), designed for real-time and streaming big data. Elastic was founded in 2012 to provide tools and services related to the distributed enterprise search engine, also known as Elasticsearch.
Kibana is designed to work in conjunction with Elasticsearch to make huge and complex data streams faster and easier to understand through graphical representation. Elasticsearch analytics provide mathematical transformations on the data as well as enhanced aggregation.
The software generates PDF reports on demand and provides a dynamic and flexible dashboard. Generated reports can represent data as bars, lines, scatterplots, or pie charts with customizable colors and highlighted search results.
Kibana also includes tools for sharing visualized data.
The product is a part of Elastic Stack, a suite of data visualization and analytics tools that also includes Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Beats. Security is provided by Kibana’s client-server architecture with authentication.
How does Kibana work in Elasticsearch?
Kibana manages to optimize user interaction with the managed information.
Data visualization
Kibana is one of the most important components of ElasticSearch. Data visualization is its main use. Although it is one of the last tasks in data processing, it is the most important for communicating the value of data to users. Data visualization aims to create a visual representation of information that makes it easy to understand.
Ultimately, data visualization is achieved through the use of the open front end which consists of a graphical interface with the data. In this way, the user can develop graphics such as maps, tables, presentations, etc.
The User Interface
Kibana in ElasticSearch is configured as an interface created for user interaction with the information processed in ElasticSearch. This interface sits on top of Elastic Stack. It, therefore, provides the user with a real-time monitoring and management experience. Subsequently, it will help him to unify the knowledge of the information, create a greater interest in the data and its value, and finally help him to make decisions and plan courses of action.
Finally, with this tool, the user will have greater interaction with other users and will be able to improve the study of data.
Why use Kibana?
Kibana manages to optimize user interaction with the managed information.
Open source and easy to configure
Dashboards and reports can be easily configured and accessible to anyone. Simply point your web browser on the machine where Kibana is configured to the default port 5601. It can also be hosted on other ports.
Rich and clear visualizations
Kibana provides various visualization options such as graphs, histograms, bar charts, heat maps, pie charts, and region maps to quickly analyze data. Kibana’s data visualization capability is not limited to numbers. It can also analyze different types of data like text and geospatial data.
Interactive Dashboard
Kibana’s dashboard makes reports and presentations easier to understand. Visualizations can be customized based on the filters added, making the dashboard interactive. Any changes to the data are automatically reflected in the dashboard.
