Step 4: Set up the Kibana dashboards

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Journalbeat comes packaged with example Kibana dashboards, visualizations, and searches for visualizing Journalbeat data in Kibana. Before you can use the dashboards, you need to create the index pattern, journalbeat-*, and load the dashboards into Kibana. To do this, you can either run the setup command (as described here) or configure dashboard loading in the journalbeat.yml config file.

This requires a Kibana endpoint configuration. If you didn’t already configure a Kibana endpoint, see configure Journalbeat.

Make sure Kibana is running before you perform this step. If you are accessing a secured Kibana instance, make sure you’ve configured credentials as described in Step 2: Configure Journalbeat.

To set up the Kibana dashboards for Journalbeat, use the appropriate command for your system. The command shown here loads the dashboards from the Journalbeat package. For more options, such as loading customized dashboards, see Importing Existing Beat Dashboards in the Beats Developer Guide. If you’ve configured the Logstash output, see Set up dashboards for Logstash output.

Use sudo to run these commands if the config file is owned by root.

deb and rpm:

journalbeat setup --dashboards

linux:

./journalbeat setup --dashboards

docker:

docker run --net="host" docker.elastic.co/beats/journalbeat:6.8.23 setup --dashboards

Set up dashboards for Logstash output

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During dashboard loading, Journalbeat connects to Elasticsearch to check version information. To load dashboards when the Logstash output is enabled, you need to temporarily disable the Logstash output and enable Elasticsearch. To connect to a secured Elasticsearch cluster, you also need to pass Elasticsearch credentials.

The example shows a hard-coded password, but you should store sensitive values in the secrets keystore.

deb and rpm:

journalbeat setup -e \
  -E output.logstash.enabled=false \
  -E output.elasticsearch.hosts=['localhost:9200'] \
  -E output.elasticsearch.username=journalbeat_internal \
  -E output.elasticsearch.password=YOUR_PASSWORD \
  -E setup.kibana.host=localhost:5601

linux:

./journalbeat setup -e \
  -E output.logstash.enabled=false \
  -E output.elasticsearch.hosts=['localhost:9200'] \
  -E output.elasticsearch.username=journalbeat_internal \
  -E output.elasticsearch.password=YOUR_PASSWORD \
  -E setup.kibana.host=localhost:5601

docker:

docker run --net="host" docker.elastic.co/beats/journalbeat:6.8.23 setup -e \
  -E output.logstash.enabled=false \
  -E output.elasticsearch.hosts=['localhost:9200'] \
  -E output.elasticsearch.username=journalbeat_internal \
  -E output.elasticsearch.password=YOUR_PASSWORD \
  -E setup.kibana.host=localhost:5601