Use a workpad in Canvas to jumpstart your APM efforts and present your data in a big, bold, and beautiful way — in real time.

<p>Since <a href="https://www.elastic.co/what-is/kibana-canvas">we launched Canvas in 2018</a>, we have seen tons of our users <a href="https://www.elastic.co/blog/monitoring-airport-security-operations-with-canvas-and-elasticsearch">create beautiful dashboards that tell stories with Elasticsearch data</a>. In the spirit of making it even easier to get started, we are creating templates that you can import and get instantly beautiful dashboards for all the data the Elastic Stack captures.&nbsp;
</p><p>In this article we’ll show you how to use a Canvas template to observe Elastic APM KPIs that complement the current APM home page and tools. Our goal is to release updates to this template, as well as new versions of other <a href="https://www.elastic.co/observability">observability</a>, <a href="https://www.elastic.co/security">security</a>, and <a href="https://www.elastic.co/enterprise-search">enterprise search</a> templates, in the future. We are making our products more integrated and ready for you to use with minimal effort right out of the box. <em>Solutions templates </em>are part of this initiative, and while this particular template needs to be downloaded and installed in Canvas, we are working on ways to deliver templates and updates inside of all Kibana apps, so stay tuned.
</p><h2>What is Elastic APM?</h2><p><a href="https://www.elastic.co/apm">Elastic APM</a> provides deep insights into the health and performance of your applications so you can troubleshoot and get to the root cause of a problem quickly. Along with these detailed insights, APM surfaces the KPIs that your DevOps and monitoring teams need to identify, investigate, and resolve issues.&nbsp;
</p><p>Canvas extends the out-of-the-box APM visualization capabilities by helping you build customized dashboards to surface your KPI data in any way that suits your needs. With Canvas templates, we are making it even easier for you to get started on your personalization/customization journey. The <strong>Elastic APM Service KPI template</strong> makes it easy to create highly customized and beautiful Canvas workpads that surface all of your service KPI data in one place.&nbsp;
</p><h2>Using the Elastic APM Service KPI template</h2><p>By the end of this article, you’ll have imported and connected the template to your data, enabling you to get better visibility into your APM data. The workpad uses the four golden signals of monitoring: latency (the time it takes to send a request and receive a response), traffic (a measure of the number of requests across a network), errors (misconfigurations, broken dependencies, etc.), and saturation (the load on your network and server resources).
</p><h3>Prerequisites</h3><p>You must be using an instance with the Elastic Common Schema (ECS) 1.5 or later enabled. If this is new to you, please visit our <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ecs/current/index.html">ECS documentation</a>, and then come back here when it’s set up. You also need APM data in your system, which is by default called apm-*. You can still download the Canvas template, but you’ll have to change around the data sources for each element. This might be what you want, so by all means go ahead.
</p><h3>Download and import the APM Canvas workpad</h3><p>You can download and import the template as a workpad. A workpad can be edited and/or cloned. If you overwrite the original template you can always import again.
</p><h3>Import as a workpad</h3><ol>
	<li>Download the <a href="https://assets.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt702d5655279f4e98/5f3d8a2a1020421e0b078218/blog-canvas-for-o11y-apm-template.json?elektra=blog-canvas-for-o11y-apm">Canvas APM JSON file here</a>&nbsp;(<strong></strong>Right-click &gt; Save As).&nbsp;Pay attention to where you put it — we’ll need it in a minute.</li>
	<li>From Kibana, open <strong>Canvas, </strong>then<strong> Import workpad JSON file</strong>.</li>
	<li>Browse for the workpad JSON file you just downloaded, then click <strong>Open.</strong></li>
	<li>Open the workpad.</li>
	<li>If this does not yield something similar to the result above, see the FAQ below.</li>
</ol><h3>Visualize your APM data in Canvas</h3><p>And that’s it! Now you can visualize your APM data in this prebuilt Canvas workpad. If you’ve never used Canvas before, or if you’ve only used it a little, we encourage you to explore. Make changes, tune it for your data, experiment with all the options. And if you break anything, don’t worry — you can just delete the workpad and start over.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt10b6a0c4910f9a2b/5f457d8da9d4814afda14049/blog-canvas-observability.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt10b6a0c4910f9a2b" alt="blog-canvas-observability.png"></p><h2>Observability and beyond</h2><p>Canvas is a powerful tool for making robust, real-time visualization of all of your data, not just APM. After you’ve had a chance to get to know the APM template, we encourage you to add data from your other data sources. Correlating APM traces with <a href="https://www.elastic.co/log-monitoring">logs</a> and <a href="https://www.elastic.co/infrastructure-monitoring">metrics</a> is the only way to achieve full observability. Not using Elastic APM yet? Try it out for yourself in a <a href="https://www.elastic.co/elasticsearch/service">free trial of Elasticsearch Service</a> or explore sample data in our <a href="https://demo.elastic.co/app/apm">live Elastic APM demo</a>.
</p><h2>Frequently asked questions (FAQ)</h2><p>Q: I can’t load the template or can’t find it.
</p><p>A: The file might be corrupt. Try downloading it again. The file may also not be in the spot you thought it was. Make sure you put it in a spot where you have rights to access it.&nbsp;&nbsp;
</p><p>Q: After loading, why does the template have a bunch of errors and exclamation marks?
</p><p>A: The data for elements with errors and exclamation marks is likely not connected correctly in the data tab of each element. You’ll have to change the queries on the data tab, and perhaps toggle some things on the display tab to reflect the proper index and field names, especially if you’ve changed them or if you are not using ECS. Note that <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ecs/current/index.html">ECS</a> with apm-* indices are prerequisites for this workpad to work out of the box. For information about how to connect your data, refer to <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/canvas.html#add-canvas-elements">Add elements</a>.
</p><p>Q: Where can I get support on this template?
</p><p>A: You can try <a href="https://discuss.elastic.co">discuss.elastic.co</a> or our <a href="https://ela.st/slack">Elastic Slack channel</a>.
</p>

blog-banner-charts-monitor.png

blog-thumb-charts-monitor.png

Bold, insightful, real-time: Visualizing APM data with Canvas in Kibana

See how Vectorspace AI uses the Elastic Stack to find and visualize correlations between genes, drug compounds, pharmaceutical news, and pharma stock prices.

generating-alpha-blog-banner.jpg

generating-alpha-blog-thumb.jpg

Generating and visualizing alpha with Vectorspace AI datasets and Canvas

From the GA release of Elastic Maps to Kerberos support and data frames transforms — and much more — Kibana 7.3 is jam packed with Kibana goodness.

<p>Today we are pleased to announce the release of Kibana 7.3.0. From Elastic Maps becoming production ready to Kerberos support and many more Kibana improvements, 7.3 is jam packed with Kibana goodness.
</p><p>Latest stable release in 7.3.0:
</p><ul>
	<li><a href="/downloads/kibana">Download Kibana 7.3.0</a></li>
	<li><a href="/guide/en/kibana/7.3/release-notes-7.3.0.html">Kibana 7.3.0 release notes</a></li>
	<li><a href="/guide/en/elastic-stack/7.3/kibana-breaking-changes.html">Kibana 7.3.0 breaking changes</a></li>
</ul><p>You can read about all the changes in the release notes linked above, but here are a few changes that are worth highlighting.
</p><h2>Elastic Maps is now GA!</h2><p>We’re excited to announce that Elastic Maps is production ready in 7.3. To find out more about what’s in Maps and how to use it, check out our <a href="/blog/elastic-maps-7-3-0-released">Maps 7.3.0 release announcement</a> and our <a href="/guide/en/kibana/master/maps.html">documentation</a>.
</p><p>The 7.3 release adds new layer styling enhancements, including the ability to select the color ramp for heatmap layers and to symbolize point features with icons that you can color, size, and rotate based on property values.
</p><p>Maps also includes a new top hits aggregation feature, which enables you to plot the most recent entities from your Elasticsearch indices.
</p><p>Another notable Maps improvement is that it’s now easier to get your geospatial data into the Elastic Stack. Use the new GeoJSON upload (beta) feature to drag and drop your points, shape files, and features and ingest them directly into Elasticsearch.
</p><p>Tooltips are enhanced to display a count of features at the current location. Pagination controls give you the ability to cycle through all features and view their properties. You can now provide custom labels for grid aggregation metrics and join metrics to provide better context in tooltips.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltcbb0ca03c4043404/5d3f57bf2550a26a5bd0aa52/kibana_7.3_release_blog_image1.gif" data-sys-asset-uid="bltcbb0ca03c4043404" alt="kibana_7.3_release_blog_image1.gif">
</p><h2>Kerberos support</h2><p>Kerberos was supported in Elasticsearch starting in 6.6, and in 7.3, Kibana introduces the Kerberos authentication provider. This provides single-sign-on (SSO) access to users and the ability to log into Kibana without repeatedly providing a username and password.
</p><p>Kerberos is one of the oldest authentication protocols and one of the most heavily used in enterprise environments, supported both in Windows and Unix-based infrastructures. As a result, it is one of the most thoroughly tested protocols. SPNEGO is used in order to negotiate and implement the Kerberos protocol for web applications, i.e., to extend it to HTTP. Kerberos takes its name from the three-headed dog in Greek mythology that guarded the gates of the Underworld so the dead could not escape.
</p><p>The high-level idea is that the client and the server each share a secret with the Kerberos Distribution Center (KDC), which is a trusted authentication entity. When the client requests a service, it authenticates with Kerberos and obtains a ticket to the service. The password never travels; rather, it is used to produce a key. The hashed key, instead of the password, is then sent to the Kerberos Authentication Service (AS). Kerberos checks for the particular user in its database, hashes the corresponding password in turn (already existing in its database), and attempts to match it to the key it received through this login attempt. If successful, it grants a ticket.
</p><p>The ticket is encrypted with the secret, which is only shared between Kerberos and the service. The client then forwards the ticket to the service, which now knows that the client has authenticated with Kerberos, since it is providing a ticket encrypted with a secret only known to itself and KDC. In an SSO environment the ticket can then be shared with other services so that the user does not need to authenticate separately for each service they need to access. Hence, depending on your set up, Kibana might be retrieving the Kerberos ticket obtained initially for other services, without asking the user to log in. Once obtained, Kibana will next forward the ticket to Elasticsearch. In return it will receive an access and refresh token for subsequent Kibana/Elasticsearch comms. The following diagram is a simplification of the protocol.
</p><p style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt252fc6f4a5d4f8ee/5d3f57e3e6078e234ba9df9f/kibana_7.3_release_blog_image2.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt252fc6f4a5d4f8ee" alt="kibana_7.3_release_blog_image2.png">
</p><p>If you would like more details, please read up in our <a href="/guide/en/kibana/current/kibana-authentication.html#saml">Kibana Docs</a>.
</p><h2>Delete and restore snapshots</h2><p>The second phase of the snapshot management UI includes two notable enhancements: delete and restore. Delete snapshots to free up your repository storage space. To recover data and state from a snapshot, use the new Restore wizard.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt537bc7186be0b0e6/5d3f57f32ec4932346e0b250/kibana_7.3_release_blog_image3.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt537bc7186be0b0e6" alt="kibana_7.3_release_blog_image3.png">
</p><h2>CSV export from a saved search
</h2><p>Kibana now allows you to export a saved search on a dashboard directly to CSV. This action is available in the dashboard panel menu for the saved search. To enable this feature, you must set <code>xpack.reporting.csv.enablePanelActionDownload: true</code> in your <code>kibana.yml</code> file.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt6974996db3a3cbb2/5d3f58003005926a604bb10f/kibana_7.3_release_blog_image4.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt6974996db3a3cbb2" alt="kibana_7.3_release_blog_image4.png">
</p><h2>SIEM & ML: Better together
</h2><p>Users looking to extend their coverage beyond the prebuilt SIEM jobs can easily add custom anomaly detection jobs using the Machine Learning app. Detected anomalies are displayed on the Hosts and Network views in the SIEM app in an Anomalies table, and specific details are available in the Host Details and IP Details pages. Check out even more details about our SIEM solution in the <a href="/blog/elastic-siem-7-3-0-released">SIEM release blog</a>.
</p><h2>APM Service Breakdown Charts
</h2><p>The APM app adds a great new "Time spent by type" chart which allows you to see exactly where your applications are spending their time, allowing you to quickly identify and fix issues.  The service breakdown chart is visible on both per-service and per-transaction screens for the supported agent types.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt3eb2c5a47f3c1dc7/5d3f580c7aa78925d4429bc6/kibana_7.3_release_blog_image5.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt3eb2c5a47f3c1dc7" alt="kibana_7.3_release_blog_image5.png">
</p><p>Read about this and other Observability changes, such as APM Agent Configuration, .NET Agent GA, Metrics Explorer GA, and more in our <a href="/blog/elastic-apm-7-3-0-released">APM</a>, <a href="/blog/elastic-infrastructure-7-3-0-released">Infrastructure</a>, <a href="/blog/elastic-logs-7-3-0-released">Logs</a>, and <a href="/blog/elastic-uptime-monitoring-7-3-0-released">Uptime</a> 7.3 blogs.
</p><h2>Show values inside bar charts
</h2><p>Bar charts now have the ability to show the values directly inside the chart, if space is available. When you create the bar chart, open <strong>Panel Settings</strong> and select <strong>Show values on chart</strong>.  A big thanks to Meir Meshi for contributing this feature.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt5ce524ed5b066cf4/5d3f581a3b58df25cf5c8efb/kibana_7.3_release_blog_image6.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt5ce524ed5b066cf4" alt="kibana_7.3_release_blog_image6.png">
</p><h2>KQL + autocomplete in filter aggregation
</h2><p>KQL + autocomplete helps users write the queries they want without the need to memorize and learn syntax. In Kibana, we are now expanding this to filter aggregations. When users use filter aggregation in Visualize or TSVB, KQL is the default language and they can use the suggestions to write their query. KQL and autocomplete help users write queries using the right field names, operators, and values.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt24f02fa9e2aa9b18/5d3f582f3871f12662b33b16/kibana_7.3_release_blog_image7.gif" data-sys-asset-uid="blt24f02fa9e2aa9b18" alt="kibana_7.3_release_blog_image7.gif">
</p><h2>Canvas updates
</h2><p>Canvas improves the user experience with new templates, experiences, and documentation.
</p><h3>Templates
</h3><p>Canvas is all about creating content and telling a story with your data. The content templates, or Canvases for short, help you facilitate this vision. In 7.3, Canvas releases three new templates: Summary, Pitch, and Status.
</p><ul>
	<li>The Summary template can help you create a report with live representations of your data.
	</li>
	<li>Pitch is a 14-page template that you can brand and customize for your next board-level presentation.
	</li>
	<li>The Status template gives you a solid, professional, and clean template for status reports and other updates.</li>
</ul><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt261f860cf17ef58e/5d3f58467aa78925d4429bd2/kibana_7.3_release_blog_image8.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt261f860cf17ef58e" alt="kibana_7.3_release_blog_image8.png">
</p><h3>Experiences</h3><p>Canvas adds a number of experiences in 7.3: nudge, alignment, distribution, zoom, and fit to screen. Nudge enables you to more precisely align elements in your workpad. Use the up, down, left, or right arrow key to nudge an element by 10 pixels. Use Shift + an arrow key to nudge an element by 1 pixel.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltb161062cf495ae52/5d3f5874d97e9a23dcc4bdd0/kibana_7.3_release_blog_image9.gif" data-sys-asset-uid="bltb161062cf495ae52" alt="kibana_7.3_release_blog_image9.gif">
</p><h3>Documentation
</h3><p>Canvas has more documentation for you to peruse. Check out the updated <a href="/guide/en/kibana/7.2/canvas-getting-started.html">Getting started guide</a>, the new introduction to <a href="/guide/en/kibana/7.3/create-canvas-workpad.html">Canvas workpads</a>, and the improved <a href="/guide/en/kibana/master/canvas-function-reference.html">function reference</a>.
</p><h2>Conclusion
</h2><p>Kibana 7.3.0 is now available, and includes many more updates than listed above. We tried to pick a few select updates. Please read our <a href="/guide/en/kibana/7.3/release-notes-7.3.0.html">Kibana 7.3.0 release notes</a> for more information about the release. You can also <a href="/downloads/kibana">download Kibana 7.3.0</a>, try it out, and let us know what you think on Twitter (<a href="https://twitter.com/elastic">@elastic</a>), or in our <a href="https://discuss.elastic.co/c/kibana">Kibana forums</a>. As you experience Kibana, you can report any problems on the <a href="https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues">Kibana GitHub issues page</a>.</p>

Articles by Shaun McGough

Bold, insightful, real-time: Visualizing APM data with Canvas in Kibana

Generating and visualizing alpha with Vectorspace AI datasets and Canvas

Kibana 7.3.0 released

Products & Solutions

Company

Resources