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Machine Learning in the Elastic Stack [7.9] » Getting started with machine learning » Explore the data in Kibana
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Explore the data in Kibanaedit

To get the best results from machine learning analytics, you must understand your data. You must know its data types and the range and distribution of values. The Data Visualizer enables you to explore the fields in your data:

  1. Open Kibana in your web browser. If you are running Kibana locally, go to http://localhost:5601/.

    The Kibana machine learning features use pop-ups. You must configure your web browser so that it does not block pop-up windows or create an exception for your Kibana URL.

  2. Click Machine Learning in the side navigation.
  3. Select the Data Visualizer tab.
  4. Click Select index and choose the kibana_sample_data_logs index pattern.
  5. Use the time filter to select a time period that you’re interested in exploring. Alternatively, click Use full kibana_sample_data_logs data to view the full time range of data.
  6. Optional: Change the sample size, which is the number of documents per shard that are used in the visualizations. There is a relatively small number of documents in the sample data, so you can choose a value of all. For larger data sets, keep in mind that using a large sample size increases query run times and increases the load on the cluster.

  7. Explore the fields and metrics in the Data Visualizer.

    It lists the fields in two sections. The first section contains the numeric ("metric") data types. The second section contains non-numeric data types (such as keyword, text, date, boolean, ip, and geo_point). For more information, see Field data types.

    For each metric, the Data Visualizer indicates how many documents contain the field in the selected time period. It also provides information about the minimum, median, and maximum values, the number of distinct values, and their distribution. You can use the distribution chart to get a better idea of how the values in the data are clustered. Alternatively, you can view the top values for metric fields. For example:

    Data Visualizer output for top values in Kibana

    In particular, look at the clientip, response.keyword, and url.keyword fields, since we’ll use them in our anomaly detection jobs. For ip and keyword fields, the Data Visualizer provides the number of distinct values, a list of the top values, and the number and percentage of documents that contain the field during the selected time period. For example:

    Data Visualizer output for keyword fields in Kibana

    Data Visualizer output for ip fields in Kibana

  8. Make note of the range of dates in the @timestamp field. They are relative to when you added the sample data and you’ll need that information later in the tutorial.

    For date fields, the Data Visualizer provides the earliest and latest field values and the number and percentage of documents that contain the field during the selected time period:

    Data Visualizer output for date fields in Kibana

Now that you’re familiar with the data in the kibana_sample_data_logs index, you can create some anomaly detection jobs to analyze it.

« Getting started with machine learning Create sample anomaly detection jobs in Kibana »