Kibana
ExplainedMonitoring
Visualisation tool for Elasticsearch data, with dashboards, charts and a search interface for logs.
Kibana, explained
Written by EduVerseWhat it is
Kibana is the web interface of the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana, often called ELK). It doesn’t store anything itself: it reads data from Elasticsearch and lets you search it, filter it and turn it into charts and dashboards in your browser.
Why teams use it
Once you run more than a handful of servers, reading log files over SSH stops working. Kibana gives everyone, not only the people with server access, one place to search all logs at once. Grafana covers similar ground and is stronger on metrics; Kibana is the obvious pick when your logs already live in Elasticsearch.
An example from work
A customer reports a failed payment at around ten past two. You open Discover in Kibana, set the time range to that window, type service.name : payments and log.level : error in the search bar, and the stack trace you need is the third hit.
Our own explanation, not a quote from the book.
In the book
Sentences from The Software Realm, Decoded that mention Kibana, exactly as printed.
3 more passages about Kibana in the full book
Read every conversation where Kibana comes up, with the interactive slides and demos.
Where it fits
Log visualisation and analysis in the ELK stack
Coverage in the book
Explained and compared with alternatives, so you know where and why it’s used.
