In simple terms, think of trying visualize your data via Kibana from any computer, but once you get to the Kibana dashboard you see 0 hits/results.
I currently have Elasticsearch on a Linux machine with no GUI (simply changing to a GUI is not allowed).
I'm trying to access my indexes using Kibana (Internet Explorer on a Windows machine).
I also have Kibana running on the Linux machine (./kibana), you can't access the Kibana machine via IP/domain unless you start the (./kibana).
But I don't know which ELK files to configure, and what to configure.
Kibana Dashboards are used to visualize the pre-configred charts, maps, time series etc.
You can not use them to do the administrative operations to your elastic search instance.
Although Kibana does have Dev Tools that you can use to query Elastic search and do mappings etc. To list all the indexes, the query to write in Dev Tools will be GET /_cat/indices?v
However, if you are looking for a GUI based tool to monitor and manage the clusters, nodes etc of Elastic Search, then you can opt for Monitoring that comes with the X-Pack
Related
When comes to centralized log tools, I see lot of comparison of ELK vs EFK vs Loki vs other.
But I have hard time to actually see information about "ELG", ELK (or EFK) but with Grafana instead of Kibana.
I know Grafana can use Elasticsearch as datasource, so it should be technically working. But how good is it? Any drawback compare to using Kibana? Maybe there are more existing dashboard for Kibana than Grafana when it comes to log?
I am asking this as I would like to have one UI system for both my metrics dashboard and my logs dashboard.
Kibana is part of the stack, so it is deeply integrated with elasticsearch, you have a lot of pre-built dashboards and apps inside Kibana like SIEM and Observability. If you use filebeat, metricbeat or any other beat to collect data it will have a lot of dashboards for a lot of systems, services and devices, so it is pretty easy to visualize your data without having to do a lot of work, basically you just need to follow the documentation.
But if you have some data that doesn't fit with one of pre-built dashboards, or want more flexibility and creat your own dashboards, Kibana needs more work than Grafana, and Kibana also only works with elasticsearch, so if you have other datasources you would need to put the data in elasticsearch. Also, if you want to have map visualizations, Kibana Map app is pretty good.
The Grafana plugin for Elasticsearch has some small bugs, but in overall it works fine, things probably will change for better since Elastic and Grafana made a partnership to improve the plugin.
So, if all your data is in elasticsearch, use Kibana, if you have different datasources, use grafana.
I am new to kibana the requirement is to build an analytical dashboard, so we are thinking of uploading the data into elastic search and give access to only visualization of kibana to build reports and use the different dashboards. I have googled and found some links for building custom dashboards using kibana plugin but We don't need any customization so we wanted to use the same kibana UI. Please share your thoughts.
Elasticsearch and Kibana are both open-source.
If you want to prevent your users from read/writing to cluster but allow them to create visualisations and dashboards then you can do so by using a basic license and setting up Role-based access control. You'll need to give them full access to .kibana index. Have a look at Elastic subscriptions to understand the different types of licenses (subscriptions).
If they only want to view and not create visualisations/dashboards, then create a RO (read-only) user with limited privileges i.e read-all but no-write permissions.
Can i use Kibana UI for client's ? Is it open source?
Yes, Kibana is open source. You need a server to host Kibana for free, or you can buy some special option like 10 nodes ES server and Kibana with SAML (Platinium plan).
Check: https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions
The name you are looking for is Elastic stack not solo Kibana.
For example Kibana needs Elasticsearch always.
Some features are in paid versions only, or in some free additional plugins.
Objective is to create a Dashboard in Kibana that include visualizations based on some special queries to monitor Elasticsearch health and status, like GET /_cluster/settings?include_defaults=true&filter_path=defaults. the problem is this query is based on no index. how can i go thru it?
Please install the free version of xpack , cluster monitoring is free.
I am using that already.
can kibana's console (in Dev Tools) be used for writing and implementing elasticsearch ? I am new to elasticsearch and very confused when it comes to doing hands-on it. thank you in advance.
kibana Dev tools makes calling elastic search API's easier so you can develop what ever you want in kibana Dev tools to make aggregation call or make query string to call the API's.
on the other hand you should use it with an SDK in your application like Elasticsearch JS for javascript so you can use the developed queries and aggregations in kibana to be used in your application and more you can monitor your shards health or put mapping for your indexes and more of functionality which can be found in Documentation, Although, you can find JS API's Documentation here
You can use Kibana Dev Tools to invoke REST API commands to perform cluster level actions such as taking snapshots, restore etc and also index simple documents. But, if you are looking to writing data to Elastic on a regular basis like ingesting server/ app logs or server metrics (CPU, memory, Disk usage etc) you should look at installing filebeats or metricbeats.
I'm trying to add a role based access control over Kibana to have different privileges and dashboards for different types of users and I found those projects:
Elastic Shield Plugin
Search Guard Kibana Multitenancy Module
Elasticsearch Read Only Rest Plugin
Kibana plugin Own Home
What I found is that:
Elastic Shield (now called X-Pack) is the best, but unfortunately it's only 30 days free trial.
search guard module is a little complicated and it does the job, but it's not for free for commercial use which isn't suitable for my case.
ReadonlyREST plugin allows you to define which user reads which data, and their Enterprise Kibana plugin (non-free) also allows you to assign kibana indices to groups or users.
Kibana Plugin Own Home is a workaround solution as it defines different kibana index for different user which isn't practical.
If you know any other projects or any workaround for the mentioned projects above that satisfies my requirements, I'd be so grateful.
Disclaimer: I work for floragunn, makers of Search Guard.
The only real way to separate dashboards and visualizations based on users/tenants is to place them in separate Kibana indices. This is what both Search Guard and Own Home does.
The reason for this is how Kibana works internally: Out of the box, Kibana will place all of these objects in one global Kibana index, shared by all users. Since Kibana itself has no notion of users, roles or tenants, the only way to do it is to intercept the calls to the Kibana index, and rewrite the index name based on the provided user/role information.
Search Guard does this directly on Elasticsearch level, so the tenant
dashboards are separated even if you access Elasticsearch directly.
Own Home does that on Kibana level, but the effect/outcome is
basically the same.
X-Pack does not have multi-tenancy for Kibana, so
there's no separation of dashboards, only access control on Elasticsearch. Same is true for ReadOnly Rest.
One other option you have is to use the Red Hat OpenShift platform. They have an Elasticsearch plugin that is integrated with the Community Edition of Search Guard, and their own Kibana multi-tenancy module. As far as I know, this plugin is completely free.
This use case is now completely supported by ReadonlyREST via the Enterprise Kibana plugin.
And it comes with a lot more multitenancy/multiuser related features:
Remove certain Kibana apps to certain users
RBAC for indices, tenancies
Read only users won't see "save", "delete", "add" buttons in the Kibana UI
I made a video months ago that shows how this looks like.
Disclaimer: I work at ReadonlyREST, happy to take questions! :-)
Open Distro for Elasticsearch is a very good opensource project for multitenancy configuration in kibana. But the problem is proper documentation is not available easily for the older versions.
Set up Multi-Tenant Kibana Access in Open Distro for Elasticsearch
Kibana multi-tenancy