Build bar charts with Kibana

Bar charts are one of the most versatile and widely used visualizations for comparing values across categories. They're perfect for showing distributions, rankings, and comparisons, making complex data understandable at a glance.

They work with any type of data: numeric values, counts, averages, or calculations. You can compare sales by region, track errors by service, analyze user engagement by feature, or rank products by revenue. Using bar charts, you can display data horizontally or vertically, stacked to show part-to-whole relationships, or grouped to compare multiple metrics side by side.

You can create bar charts in Kibana using Lens.

To build a bar chart:

Stacked bar charts show how different components contribute to a total value. Each bar is divided into colored segments representing different categories, allowing you to view both the total and the breakdown.

Stacked bar charts work best when:

• You want to show part-to-whole relationships
• The total value is meaningful
• You have 2-7 segments per bar, more can become hard to read
• The segments don't vary wildly in size

To create a stacked bar chart:

1. Create a Bar visualization and set it to Stacked.
   Tip

   You can also set it to Percentage for a stacked display but as percentages of the total instead, allowing you to compare proportions even when absolute values differ greatly.

2. Add the main metric you want to visualize to the vertical axis.
3. Add a dimension to the horizontal axis to create the bars.
4. Add a dimension to Break down by to split each bar into stacked segments, recognizable with varying colors.

Unstacked bar charts display multiple bars side by side for each category, allowing you to compare different metrics or time periods.

Use unstacked bar charts when:

• You need to compare 2-4 metrics across categories
• Direct comparison between metrics is more important than viewing totals
• The metrics have similar scales

To create an unstacked bar chart:

1. Create a Bar chart visualization and set it to Unstacked
2. Add the main metric you want to visualize to the vertical axis.
3. Add a dimension to the horizontal axis.
4. Add a dimension to Break down by to split each bar into different bars that show next to each other, recognizable with varying colors.

Customize your bar chart to display exactly the information you need, formatted the way you want.

Data

The dimension that creates your individual bars. Common options include:

• Date histogram: Create time-based bars with configurable intervals.
• Filters: Define custom categories using KQL queries.
• Intervals: Group data into numerical ranges.
• Top values: Specify fields for which to gather top values.

Appearance

Define the formatting of the horizontal axis, including:

• Name: Customize the axis label to describe what the bars represent.
• Value format: Select to display values as number, percent, bytes, bits, duration, or with a custom format.

Data

The metric that determines the height of your bars. When you drag a field onto the vertical axis, Kibana suggests a function based on the field type. You can change it and use aggregation functions like Sum, Average, Count, Median, Min, Max, and more, or create custom calculations with formulas. Refer to Lens > Use formulas to perform math for examples, or to the Formula reference available from Lens.

Advanced settings

Depending on the data you defined, several options allow you to apply additional filtering to the data taken into account to compute the final value to show.

Based on the type of visualization you're creating, only some of the following options can be available:

• Normalize by unit: Normalize the metric values to show per unit of time.
• Filter by: Specify a query.
• Reduced time range: Reduce the time range specified on the dashboard's time filter by the specified duration.
• Time shift: Shift the time range by the specified duration. This is useful if the value should use a different time range than the one selected on the dashboard.
• Hide zero values: Don't show values equal to zero. This option is on by default.

Appearance

Define the formatting of the vertical axis, including:

• Name: By default, the chart uses the function or formula as the axis label. It's a best practice to customize this with a meaningful title.
• Value format: Select to display values as number, percent, bytes, bits, duration, or with a custom format.
• Series color: Assign a specific color to bars. This option isn't available when the Breakdown option is defined for the chart, because it's the color mapping of that option that is then taken into account.
• Axis side: Choose to display the vertical axis on the left or right side of the graph. By default, the axis displays on the left.

Data

Split your bars into segments or groups based on another dimension. Each unique value creates its own segment or bar, allowing you to show composition or compare metrics across multiple dimensions. Common options include:

• Date histogram: Create time-based bars with configurable intervals.
• Filters: Define custom categories using KQL queries.
• Intervals: Group data into numerical ranges.
• Top values: Specify fields for which to gather top values.

Appearance

Define the formatting of the breakdown, including:

• Name: Customize the legend label.
• Value format: Select to display values as number, percent, bytes, bits, duration, or with a custom format.
• Color mapping: Select a color palette or assign specific colors to categories.

When creating or editing a visualization, you can customize several appearance options from the Style or Legend menus.

Appearance

Select the bar orientation. It can be Horizontal or Vertical.

Titles and text

Specify to hide or show bar values on bar charts:

• Hide: Removes the numeric value from the bars entirely. Only the bar height represents the magnitude.
• Show, if able: Attempts to draw the value inside each bar, but the label will only render when there’s enough vertical space to keep text legible; crowded bars will not have labels.

Your selection applies to the entire chart layer, so you can turn labels on for quick KPI-style charts or keep them off for dense histograms.

Left axis

Left-axis controls for Lens bar charts let you tune how the vertical scale looks and behaves. Key options are:

• Title: Set the label that appears under the axis (for example, "Date"). You can hide the label entirely if the layout is tight.
• Gridlines: Toggles vertical guide lines across the chart, which help compare bar positions against the axis scale.
• Tick labels: Show or hide the textual values beneath the ticks. When visible, the orientation picker lets you rotate them (horizontal, angled, vertical) to avoid overlap on dense timelines.
• Orientation: Set the placement of the axis title. It can be Horizontal, Vertical, or Angled.
• Axis scale: Select linear (default), log, or square-root scaling.
• Bounds & rounding: Manually clamp the axis to a min/max or let Lens round to nice intervals. For numeric histograms this also controls whether “nice” bucket labels are used.

Note

Left axis and Bottom axis options can interchange depending on the orientation you selected for the bar chart.

Bottom axis

Bottom-axis controls for Lens bar charts let you tune how the horizontal scale looks and behaves. Key options are:

• Title: Set the label that appears under the axis (for example, "Date"). You can hide the label entirely if the layout is tight.
• Gridlines: Toggles vertical guide lines across the chart, which help compare bar positions against the axis scale.
• Tick labels: Show or hide the textual values beneath the ticks. When visible, the orientation picker lets you rotate them (horizontal, angled, vertical) to avoid overlap on dense timelines.
• Show partial data markers: Highlights buckets at the edges of the time range that only contain partial data—useful for time-based bar charts so viewers know the first/last bucket might be incomplete.
• Show current time marker: Draws a vertical marker for “now” on time charts, so you can see how recent the latest bar is.

Configure elements of your bar chart's legend. Configurable options include:

Visibility

Specify whether to automatically show the legend or hide it.

Position

Choose to show the legend inside or outside the chart, then pick the side (left, right, top, or bottom) and fine-tune alignment (vertical/horizontal) for grid-style layouts.

Width

Set the width of the legend.

Statistics

Choose one or more statistics to show (for example, average, min, max, last value). Lens appends those numbers to every series label so you don't have to hover over the chart to see headline figures.

Label truncation

Choose whether to truncate long series labels, and set a limit for how many lines render when it's inside the chart.

The following examples show various configuration options that you can use for building impactful bar charts.

Weekly website traffic per region

Track website visits over time, broken down by traffic source:

• Title: "Weekly website traffic per region"
• Vertical axis: count()
  • Name: "Page Views"
  • Value format: Number
• Horizontal axis: date_histogram(timestamp, interval='1w')
  • Name: "Week"
• Break down by: geo.dest
  • Number of values: 9
• Layout: Stacked
• Legend: Right side, showing regions

Request error rate per host (with threshold)

Monitor error rates across hosts with a target threshold line:

• Title: "Request error rate per host"
• Vertical axis: count(kql='response > "300"') / count()
  • Name: "Error Rate %"
  • Value format: Percent
• Horizontal axis: terms(service.name)
  • Name: "Hosts"
  • Number of values: 4
  • Rank by: Alphabetical
• Reference line: Value 0,10 (10% threshold)
  • Label: "Maximum acceptable error rate"
  • Color: Red, dashed line
• Layout: Horizontal orientation (for better service name readability)