Tech Topics

Re-creating Kibana 3 dashboards in Kibana 4

In my role I speak with many Kibana 3 users in the process of re-creating their dashboards in Kibana 4. In these conversations, I find that one of the biggest struggles is wrapping your head around how Kibana 4 approaches UI organization and navigation differently from Kibana 3. 

This video walks you through how to manually rebuild a very typical Kibana 3 dashboard in Kibana 4. I hope it can help some of you coming from Kibana 3 world at least get started thinking about your transition. 

Some highlights:

  • Adding saved search to the dashboard to get a raw document view
  • Configuring the "Logstash Dashboard" in Kibana 4
  • Re-creating equivalents of "terms", "hits", "table", "histogram", "bettermap", "stats" panels
  • Add and modify filters and queries at the top of your dashboard
  • Adding finishing touches, such as the dark theme

"Before" screenshot:

K3K4-before.png

"After" screenshot:

K3K4-after.png

There are a few of enhancements we are experimenting with that will make your Kibana 4 experience closer to Kibana 3, such as structured inputs for filters and a vectormap plugin. However, we hope that as you start using Kibana 4, you will soon start to leverage the power of multi-level aggregations in Elasticsearch and Kibana 4 plugin system to structure interactions with your data in completely new ways. 

There are many Kibana 4 features this video doesn't cover — for more ideas refer to some of our earlier tutorial videos, peruse the docs, or simply download, install, and play with Kibana 4. 

If you have questions about Kibana 3 to 4 transitions, please join in on discussions on IRC (#kibana on irc.freenode.net) or on Discuss forums. Also, let us know what other Kibana video tutorials you'd like to see!