ELK – Dashboards with Kibana
Kibana as a Business Intelligence Tool
In the previous posts, we looked at the benefits of real-time data analysis within companies and the tools needed to achieve this goal. In this post, we will use the Kibana tool built into the ELK stack, which will be responsible for generating the B.I. visualizations.
What is Kibana?
Kibana is a visualization plugin belonging to the ELK stack that is used to create visualizations and dashboards, in other words, it is a business intelligence tool.
How do we access Kibana?
To access this plugin, if we install it with the default settings, we can reach it through our browser using the address 127.0.0.1:5601 or localhost:5601. In other words, it is a web application. This allows Kibana to be installed on a server and accessed, with the appropriate configuration, from any computer connected to our network.
What does Kibana offer us?
Kibana provides us with a graphical, intuitive interface for creating custom charts. It lets us easily choose from 16 different chart types.
Among these options, for our example we will select the line chart and access a menu where we can configure which variable we want to use for the X axis and which for the Y axis. In this case, continuing with the data collected from the cars, we can generate a chart that plots the time at which the data was captured against the RPM at each moment.
If we run the chart, we can see the resulting graph to the right of the menu. In this case, we have used a time interval from 11:41 AM to 11:54 AM today.
Obviously, we can create different types of charts and use different metrics; for example, if we selected the “Gauge” chart format, we could display the maximum RPM reached during the time period.
Finally, once we have created all the charts we are interested in and saved them properly, we can build a dashboard.
In the menu on the left, by selecting the “Dashboard” option, we can create our own custom KPI panel by adding all the charts we have created.
Another option Kibana offers for data visualization is “Timelion,” located in the menu on the left. This tool is a time series editor. This means we can compare charts against each other; for example, we can compare the RPM at the same point in time between a gasoline vehicle and a diesel one.
These types of charts can also be added to the dashboard alongside the other charts.
How can we visualize data in Kibana in real time?
The main goal of these posts is to achieve real-time graphical representation of the data generated and stored within the ELK stack, and thanks to Kibana, this turns out to be very simple. In the upper right corner of the application, where we have the date range we are viewing, we can configure the charts to refresh at a set interval.
By performing this simple action, and as long as we have records being constantly stored in our database, we will be able to read and display them graphically in a fast, simple, and customized way.
To wrap up this series of four posts, all that remains is to show the final results obtained from the cars studied. This last post will be published later this week—are you ready?