Step 4: Set up the Kibana dashboards

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Packetbeat comes packaged with example Kibana dashboards, visualizations, and searches for visualizing Packetbeat data in Kibana. Before you can use the dashboards, you need to create the index pattern, packetbeat-*, 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 packetbeat.yml config file.

Starting with Beats 6.0.0, the dashboards are loaded via the Kibana API. This requires a Kibana endpoint configuration. You should have configured the endpoint earlier when you configured Packetbeat. If you didn’t, configure it now.

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 Packetbeat.

To set up the Kibana dashboards for Packetbeat:

deb, rpm, and mac:

From the directory where you installed Packetbeat, run:

./packetbeat setup --dashboards

If you changed ownership of the config file to root, you’ll need preface this command with sudo.

docker:

docker run docker.elastic.co/beats/packetbeat:6.0.1 setup --dashboards

win:

Open a PowerShell prompt as an Administrator (right-click the PowerShell icon and select Run As Administrator). If you are running Windows XP, you may need to download and install PowerShell.

From the PowerShell prompt, change to the directory where you installed Packetbeat, and run:

PS > packetbeat setup --dashboards