Kibana—your window into Elastic

Kibana enables you to give shape to your data and navigate the Elastic Stack. With Kibana, you can:

Kibana is for administrators, analysts, and business users. As an admin, your role is to manage the Elastic Stack, from creating your deployment to getting Elasticsearch data into Kibana, and then managing the data. As an analyst, your job is to discover insights in the data, visualize your data on dashboards, and share your findings. As a business user, you want to view existing dashboards and drill down into details.

Kibana works with all types of data. Your data can be structured or unstructured text, numerical data, time-series data, geospatial data, logs, metrics, security events, and more. Kibana is designed to use Elasticsearch as a data store. No matter your data, Kibana can help you uncover patterns and relationships and visualize the results.

Start with the home page, where you’re presented options for adding your data. You can collect data from an app or service or upload a file that contains your data. If you’re not ready to use your own data, you can add a sample data set.

The home page provides access to the Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security solutions, and everything you need to visualize and analyze your data.

To access all of Kibana features, use the main menu. Open this menu by clicking the menu icon. To keep the main menu visible at all times, click Dock navigation. For a quick reference of all Kibana features, refer to What’s the right app for you?

Being able to search, observe, and protect your data is a requirement for any analyst. Kibana provides solutions for each of these use cases.

Data analysis is a core functionality of Kibana. You can quickly search through large amounts of data, explore fields and values, and then use Kibana’s drag-and-drop interface to rapidly build charts, tables, metrics, and more.

If you’re looking to better understand the “where’’ in your data, your data analysis journey will also include Maps. This app is the right choice when you’re looking for a spatial pattern, performing ad-hoc location-driven analysis, or analyzing metrics with a geographic perspective. With Maps, you can build world country maps, administrative region maps, and point-to-point origin-destination maps. You can also visualize and track movement over space and through time.

To model the behavior of your data, you’ll use Machine learning. This app can help you extract insights from your data that you might otherwise miss. You can forecast unusual behavior in your time series data. You can also perform outlier detection, regression, and classification analysis on your data and generate annotated results.

Looking to uncover how items in your data are related? Graph is your app. Graphing relationships is useful in a variety of use cases, from fraud detection to recommendation engines. For example, graph exploration can help you uncover website vulnerabilities that hackers are targeting, so you can harden your website. Or, you might provide graph-based personalized recommendations to your e-commerce customers.

Kibana’s Management UIs takes you under the hood, so you can twist the levers and turn the knobs. You’ll find guided processes for administering all things Elastic Stack, including data, indices, clusters, alerts, and security.

Kibana offers these data management tasks—all from the convenience of a UI:

Detecting and acting on significant shifts and signals in your data is a need that exists in almost every use case. For example, you might set an alert to notify you when:

An alert triggers when a specified condition is met. For example, you can trigger an alert when the average or max of one of your metrics exceeds a threshold within a specified time frame.

When the alert triggers, you can send a notification to a system that is part of your daily workflow. Kibana integrates with email, Slack, PagerDuty, and ServiceNow, to name a few.

A dedicated view for creating, searching, and editing alerts is in Alerts and Actions.

Want to share Kibana’s goodness with other people or teams without overwhelming them? You can do so with Spaces, built for organizing your visualizations, dashboards, and indices. Think of a space as its own mini Kibana installation—it’s isolated from all other spaces, so you can tailor it to your specific needs without impacting others.

Most of Kibana’s entities are space-aware, including dashboards, visualizations, index patterns, Canvas workpads, graphs, tags, and machine learning jobs.

In addition:

You can take spaces one step further and control which features are visible within each space. For example, you might hide Dev Tools in your "Executive" space or show Stack Monitoring only in your "Admin" space.

Controlling feature visibility is not a security feature. To secure access to specific features on a per-user basis, you must configure Kibana Security.

Kibana offers a range of security features for you to control who has access to what. The security features are automatically turned on when security is enabled in Elasticsearch. For a description of all available configuration options, see Security settings in Kibana.

Kibana supports several authentication providers, allowing you to login using Elasticsearch’s built-in realms, or by your own single sign-on provider.

Kibana provides roles and privileges for controlling which users can view and manage Kibana features. Privileges grant permission to view an application or perform a specific action and are assigned to roles. Roles allow you to describe a “template” of capabilities that you can grant to many users, without having to redefine what each user should be able to do.

When you create a role, you can scope the assigned Kibana privileges to specific spaces. This makes it possible to grant users different access levels in different spaces, or even give users their very own private space. For example, power users might have privileges to create and edit visualizations and dashboards, while analysts or executives might have Dashboard and Canvas with read-only privileges.

Kibana’s role management interface allows you to describe these various access levels, or you can automate role creation via our API.

Once you have your users and roles configured, you might want to maintain a record of who did what, when. The Kibana audit log will record this information for you, which can then be correlated with Elasticsearch audit logs to gain more insights into your users’ behavior. For more information, see Kibana audit logging.

Using the search field in the global header, you can search for applications and objects, such as dashboards and visualizations. Search suggestions include deep links into applications, allowing you to directly navigate to the views you need most.

When searching for objects, you can search by type, name, and tag. Tags are keywords or labels that you assign to Kibana objects, so you can classify the objects in a way that is meaningful to you. You can then quickly search for related objects based on shared tags.

To get the most from the search feature, follow these tips:

Kibana has a wealth of apps, each with its own area of specialty. Scan this table to quickly find the app that gets you to our goal.

Using our in-product guidance can help you get up and running, faster. Click the help icon for help with questions or to provide feedback.

To keep up with what’s new and changed in Elastic, click the celebration icon in the global header.