What is Kibana?
Kibana is the visualization and exploration platform for the Elastic Stack, providing powerful tools to search, view, and interact with data stored in Elasticsearch. It transforms complex data into intuitive visualizations, enabling users to create dashboards, perform ad-hoc analysis, and monitor real-time metrics.
As the window into the Elastic Stack, Kibana offers everything from histograms and line graphs to geospatial maps and machine learning visualizations. It's widely used for log analytics, application monitoring, security analytics, and business intelligence across industries.
Kibana Dashboard Performance Calculator
Memory Required: 3,048 MB
Max Users: 269
Render Time: 5s
Kibana Visualization Types
Lens
Drag-and-drop interface for creating visualizations without coding.
• Multiple chart types
• Formula calculations
• Quick switching between viz types
• No aggregation knowledge needed
TSVB (Time Series)
Advanced time series visualizations with mathematical transformations.
• Mathematical operations
• Annotations support
• Markdown panels
• Pipeline aggregations
Maps
Geospatial data visualization with multiple layer types.
• Region maps
• Heat maps
• Vector layers
• Custom base maps
Canvas
Pixel-perfect presentations and infographics from live data.
• CSS styling
• SQL queries
• Custom expressions
• Presentation mode
Kibana Core Features
Discover
Explore and search your data with powerful query capabilities and field-level analysis.
# Simple field search
status: 404 AND response_time > 1000
# Wildcard and range queries
host.name: web-* AND @timestamp >= "2024-01-01"
# Nested field queries
user.location.country: "US" AND user.age: [18 TO 65]Dashboard
Create interactive dashboards combining multiple visualizations with drill-down capabilities.
{
"version": "8.0.0",
"timeRestore": true,
"refreshInterval": {
"pause": false,
"value": 30000
},
"filters": [
{
"query": {
"match": {
"environment": "production"
}
}
}
]
}Alerting
Set up alerts and notifications based on data thresholds and anomaly detection.
# Watcher alert for high error rate
PUT _watcher/watch/error_rate_alert
{
"trigger": {
"schedule": {
"interval": "1m"
}
},
"condition": {
"compare": {
"ctx.payload.aggregations.error_rate.value": {
"gt": 0.05
}
}
}
}Real-World Kibana Implementations
Netflix
Monitors streaming infrastructure and content delivery performance globally.
- • 100+ billion events per day
- • Real-time streaming quality metrics
- • Global CDN performance monitoring
- • Customer experience dashboards
Walmart
Analyzes e-commerce transactions and inventory across stores worldwide.
- • Transaction analytics dashboards
- • Inventory tracking visualizations
- • Customer behavior analysis
- • Supply chain monitoring
Cisco
Security operations center for threat detection and incident response.
- • Security event correlation
- • Threat hunting dashboards
- • Network traffic analysis
- • Compliance reporting
Spotify
Monitors application performance and user engagement metrics.
- • Streaming quality metrics
- • User engagement dashboards
- • A/B testing visualizations
- • Infrastructure monitoring
Kibana Optimization Techniques
Performance Optimization
- • Use saved searches to reduce query overhead
- • Implement index patterns with time-based indices
- • Optimize visualization aggregations
- • Enable query result caching
- • Use runtime fields sparingly
- • Limit dashboard auto-refresh intervals
Dashboard Design
- • Group related visualizations together
- • Use appropriate visualization types for data
- • Implement progressive disclosure
- • Add markdown panels for context
- • Use drill-downs for detailed analysis
- • Design for different screen sizes
Kibana Best Practices
✅ Do
- • Use index patterns with wildcards efficiently
- • Create role-based access controls (RBAC)
- • Version control dashboard configurations
- • Implement proper time zone handling
- • Use Spaces for multi-tenancy
- • Regular backup of saved objects
❌ Don't
- • Create too many visualizations per dashboard
- • Use wildcards that match too many indices
- • Ignore field mapping conflicts
- • Set refresh intervals too aggressively
- • Neglect dashboard performance testing
- • Skip security configurations