News

Kibana 4. Literally.

Kibana 4 is now, literally, figuratively, conceptually, spiritually, and deliciously production ready. Ok, it was ready a week ago, but we wanted to make absolutely sure that we were totally happy with it. And we are, and we want to share the happiness that is Kibana 4.0.0 GA with you. Gratuitous screenshots and backstory below. If you're just too excited for all of that, we've devised a two-step plan:

  1. Get it. From the Kibana 4 downloads page
  2. Grok it. In the Kibana 4 docs

Tip: If you haven't already, you will need to upgrade your cluster to Elasticsearch 1.4.4
Tip 2: If you're upgrading from Kibana 4 RC1, you'll need to migrate your config. See this gist to migrate

The back story

Kibana has always been a tool for solving problems. Why am I getting paged at 2am every night? When did that code get pushed to production? Did it break something as a result? Well, we solved all of those. Globally, for years, not a single person has been paged at 2am. I know, right?

But there's a catch: As the answers get easier, the questions get harder. The easy wins were easy. Now, let's solve the hard problems, the problems three layers deep. Let's solve the problems that require analyzing multiple dimensions, multiple fields, and multiple data sources. Kibana 4 is us, working together, to solve the hardest problems in the least amount of time, and with the least hassle.

We took everything we learned from Kibana 3 and applied it to Kibana 4. Why settle for one thousand points on a map, when we could have one billion? Why settle for one field on a chart? Or one chart in a panel? Why just one index on a dashboard? Let's generate 5 scenarios, comparing data across 2 fields and put them all on a dashboard with data from 3 indexes. Yeah. Let's do that, then let's go get ice cream. With sprinkles.

The plot

Like ice cream, problems come in many flavors. To that end, we've divided Kibana up neapolitan style, except we left out that flavor you don't like. If you're a long-term Kibana user, you'll feel right at home on the first tab Discover. This allows you to quickly iterate on searches, find records, and keep solving the easy problems that are quickly corrected by finding that one line that tells the whole story.

When things get more complex than simple search can account for, it's time to make magic with charts and graphs. Dive into the Visualize tab to break down data with the power of Elasticsearch aggregations. Visualize exposes the multi-dimensional nature of data and lets you build charts, tables and maps that quickly answer the kind of questions you never would have known to ask before. The question you might have asked first was “Why was the site slow last week?", but the question revealed by the data is “Why did the average file size of requests made from Tokyo spike on Christmas day?"

Finally, bring it all together on the Dashboard. Put it on the big screen and say: “There's your answer and here's a link for later. Also, I embedded it in the wiki, mailed you a csv export of the data, ate some ice cream and wrote the first chapter of my autobiography. Now get me more ice cream, I earned it."

For a more in-depth look at each tab, check out the Kibana 4 Beta 1: Released blog post.

To be continued…

It's probably time for a nap right? Nope. Kibana 4.1 is already in the works and we have big plans for the future. Much effort went into making the underpinnings of Kibana 4 stable and sensible, giving us a platform to build the future of Elasticsearch applications upon. The entire thing was designed to be extended. For example, visualizations were built to be, well, built upon. Open source is more than a GitHub account to us, it's our commitment to creating a structure that enables everyone to build new amazing things.

Watch our developer blog space for articles on building your own Kibana visualizations and creating your own applications that work with Elasticsearch. Want a sneak peek? Check out Spencer Alger's talk at Elastic{ON}15.

We wouldn't be here without you, and we're not going anywhere without your help, so please, ping us on GitHub with issues, suggestions, and contributions. Or, if you love IRC like we do, join us in #kibana on Freenode.

Extra credit

Want the whole Kibana 4 story as it happened? Check out the previous blog posts from the Kibana 4 beta series:

Kibana 4 Beta 1: Released
Kibana 4 Beta 2: Get it now
Kibana 4 Beta 3: Now more filtery
Kibana 4 RC1: Freshly baked

And finally, if you think you have a good Kibana success story, we'd love to hear it. Give us a shout at stories@elastic.co or on Twitter and we'll see how we can share your successes with the world!