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Elastic Docs ›Beats Developer Guide [6.2] ›Creating New Kibana Dashboards for a Beat or a Beat module

Importing Existing Beat Dashboards

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Importing Existing Beat Dashboards

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The official Beats come with Kibana dashboards, and starting with 6.0.0, they are part of every Beat package. You can use the Beat executable to import all the dashboards and the index pattern for a Beat, including the dependencies such as visualizations and searches.

You can use the Beat executable to import all the dashboards and the index pattern for a Beat, including the dependencies such as visualizations and searches.

To import the dashboards, run the setup command.

./metricbeat setup

The setup phase loads:

  • Index mapping template in Elasticsearch
  • Kibana dashboards
  • Machine Learning jobs (if available)

For more details about the setup command, run the following:

./metricbeat help setup

This command does initial setup of the environment:

 * Index mapping template in Elasticsearch to ensure fields are mapped.
 * Kibana dashboards (where available).
 * ML jobs (where available).

Usage:
  filebeat setup [flags]

Flags:
      --dashboards         Setup dashboards only
  -h, --help               help for setup
      --machine-learning   Setup machine learning job configurations only
      --modules string     List of enabled modules (comma separated)
      --template           Setup index template only

The flags are useful when you don’t want to load everything. For example, to import only the dashboards, use the --dashboards flag:

./metricbeat setup --dashboards

Starting with Beats 6.0.0, the dashboards are no longer loaded directly into Elasticsearch. Instead, they are imported directly into Kibana. Thus, if your Kibana instance is not listening on localhost, or you enabled X-Pack for Kibana, you need to either configure the Kibana endpoint in the config for the Beat, or pass the Kibana host and credentials as arguments to the setup command. For example:

./metricbeat setup -E setup.kibana.host=192.168.3.206:5601 -E setup.kibana.username=elastic -E setup.kibana.password=secret

By default, the setup command imports the dashboards from the kibana directory, which is available in the Beat package.

The format of the saved dashboards is not compatible between Kibana 5.x and 6.x. Thus, the Kibana 5.x dashboards are available in the 5.x directory, and the Kibana 6.0 dashboards, and older are in the default directory.

In case you are using customized dashboards, you can import them:

  • from a local directory:

    ./metricbeat setup -E setup.dashboards.directory=kibana

  • from a local zip archive:

    ./metricbeat setup -E setup.dashboards.file=metricbeat-dashboards-6.0.zip

  • from a zip archive available online:

    ./metricbeat setup -E setup.dashboards.url=path/to/url

    See Kibana dashboards configuration for a description of the setup.dashboards configuration options.

Import Dashboards for Development

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You can make use of the Makefile from the Beat GitHub repository to import the dashboards. If Elasticsearch is running on localhost, then you can run the following command from the Beat repository:

make import-dashboards

If Elasticsearch is running on a different host, then you can use the ES_URL variable:

ES_URL="http://192.168.3.206:9200" make import-dashboards

Kibana dashboards configuration

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The configuration file (*.reference.yml) of each Beat contains the setup.dashboards section for configuring from where to get the Kibana dashboards, as well as the name of the index pattern. Each of these configuration options can be overwritten with the command line options by using -E flag.

setup.dashboards.directory=<local_dir>
Local directory that contains the saved dashboards and their dependencies. The default value is the kibana directory available in the Beat package.
setup.dashboards.file=<local_archive>
Local zip archive with the dashboards. The archive can contain Kibana dashboards for a single Beat or for multiple Beats. The dashboards of each Beat are placed under a separate directory with the name of the Beat.
setup.dashboards.url=<zip_url>
Zip archive with the dashboards, available online. The archive can contain Kibana dashboards for a single Beat or for multiple Beats. The dashboards for each Beat are placed under a separate directory with the name of the Beat.
setup.dashboards.index <elasticsearch_index>
You should only use this option if you want to change the index pattern name that’s used by default. For example, if the default is metricbeat-*, you can change it to custombeat-*.
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