Kibana: 5 Reasons Why You Should Start Using It Right Now.
More and more people are getting used to Kibana as their preferred data visualization tool and even more as a BI tool.
In this article, we’re going to go through the reasons why Kibana is getting so popular across IT engineers (developers, DevOps, system administrators) and what its tons of features can bring to you. Ready? Without further ado, let’s jump right in.
1- Search made easy
As Elasticsearch fans we’re used to making requests from the terminal: it easier once we get used to it and let’s tell the truth it makes us feel good as geeks but … when it comes to letting the management team members access those data, it can be somehow difficult to them. Kibana aims to make this much easier than you can think of.
All you have to do is to create an index pattern and start making requests against data stored on your Elasticsearch instance.
2- Great tools to visualize easily your data
One of the main tasks of management teams is to have an idea about how data have been changing. And for that purpose, an image is worth a lot of words.
Kibana lets you choose from a large range of graphics how you’d like to show your data progress. And trust me you’re gonna have more than you can imagine if you haven’t tested it yet.
3- The best way to monitor your applications
I know that there are a lot of tools out there from Grafana to Prometheus to help you monitor your systems, servers, and applications but you know what, Kibana comes with some features specifically developed to make it easy for you to grab and to look into your logs without worrying about how to format them from the source.
With an Application Performance Monitoring server added to the ELK stack, you can easily get information about your running applications in almost all of the languages, technologies, frameworks: Laravel, Go, Java, NodeJs, and so on.
But that’s not all. There are pre-configured dashboards for you to look at your infrastructure logs (Apache, Kubernetes, Docker, …) that you can take advantage of. Just install Kibana and start playing around for real. Oh, I forgot: It’s FREE.
4- Complete alerts system that triggers custom actions
Yes, Kibana and the whole ELK stack are not the first in proposing that feature. But take a minute to think about a solution that offers you alert notifications through all these channels: email, webhooks, IBM Resilient, Jira, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Slack — yes you heard me right. That’s also Kibana somehow.
5- Get insights from your data and show them creatively
Have you heard about Kibana Lens or Kibana Canva?
Kibana Lens is the pure wine of visualization graphics on Kibana. It takes data visualization to a next level with easiness and more flexibility. It comes with useful graphic tools you just have to drag and drop in order to get great graphics.
Kibana Canva is simply the PowerPoint of the Elastic Stack specialist. It allows you to show interactively your data through good UI effects and you don’t have to worry about data changing from your Elasticsearch instance.
Conclusion
ELK stack is getting more popular and Kibana as well. It may be the right time for you to get started playing around it, making your hands dirty so that you can take a huge advantage of the thousands of amazing tools it offers. If you want to have the full list of Kibana features, just head up over here and you’re done: https://www.elastic.co/kibana/features.
Till next time, my friends, take care 😷.
