Grafana with elasticsearch data source - elasticsearch

I am currently running the latest (master) of grafana which supports elasticsearch as data source. I am able to connect to elasticsearch but cannot find docs on structure for storing metrics in elasticsearch.
I know it's not officially released yet but since I am already running elasticserach it would be nice not to setup another data source like influxDB.
Does anybody has experience with this setup?

ok found it, basically you can use whatever structure you want as long as there is and #timestamp attribute. Example:
{ #timestamp: '2015-10-22T12:00:00.000 +0200',
name: 'my event',
load: 0.5,
cpu: 50
}
Now you can filter, group or search these attributes in grafana.

Related

ELK with Grafana instead of Kibana for centralized log

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.

OSmetrics in kibana

We get data in Kibana, but we can't make any sense of it. We want to visualize the OS metrics in Kibana, but I don't seem to get them in percentages and I want them to update automatically.
We are using the full elkstack with metricbeat and we want the data to go through logstash to keep it more future proof.

Kibana as Elasticsearch monitoring solution

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.

Kibana Alternatives

I am having an issue in kibana. It does not show any results in the Discover tab.
Please look here for more information.
Do we have any Kibana alternatives that the community has used? I searched on the internet and I could find only Head elasticSearch plugin. If nothing works, then I will work on consuming the ElasticSearch JSON feed using .Net and asp.net charts.
The only thing I know of would be Grafana. But that won't support ES until version 2.5. So currently you're going to have to make due with Kibana or manual labor.
EDIT
Grafana 2.5 has been released and features a ElasticSearch query editor.
I assume you are talking about Kibana 4 or 5. When this happens to me it usually means that the time filter is set to a period when there is no data for or documents do not have time stamps or the mapping of time stamp field is not set to 'date'. So the solution is to use Kibana 3 as your discovery panel. Here is a link to a fork that supports aggregations and Elasticsearch 2.x and 5.x.
https://github.com/immunochomik/kibana3
In Kibana 3 you can remove time filter completely so the time histogram will try to show you all the data in the index, also if there are no time stamps you can still look at data in terms panels and documents panels.
Another interesting alternative is redash, you can build dashboards combining many sources of data including Elasticsearch. Drawback is that you need to know how to write a query.
Open source options: Grafana, Redash
If you are open to commercial solutions, Knowi might be an option for more advanced needs (multi-index/multi-database joins, AI etc). See their ElasticSearch playground.

Install grafana without elasticseach

I’m trying to install grafana to work with OpenTSDB datasource. I’d like to know, what should I do to install it without elasticsearch?
I'm using grafana with Influxdb and I'm not using elasticsearch.
Grafana 2 is out in beta and I've been using that in production for a while. Grafana 2 now has its own data store, which either uses MySQL or SQLite. But you can always use Elasticsearch as well. You can read more about it here
Update: Stable version of Grafana 2 is now out, and it just works.
Grafana is a frontend, you will need some kind of database to store values and configuration in. I just grabbed the .tar.gz file from grafana's downloads page, created a config.js and pointed it at my influxdb server. No elasticsearch here, either.
You might want to take a look at gofana which will allow you to run Grafana without Elasticsearch. It's a self-contained binary that allows you to store dashboards on the filesystem and not in Elasticsearch or InfluxDB. It also supports HTTPS and basic authentication.
Note: I'm the author of gofana.

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