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Elastic Docs ›Kibana User Guide [5.4] ›Visualize

Creating a Visualization

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Creating a Visualization

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To create a visualization:

  1. Click on Visualize in the side navigation.
  2. Click the Create new visualization button or the + button.

  3. Choose the visualization type:

    • Basic charts

      Line, Area and Bar charts

      Compare different series in X/Y charts.

      Heat maps

      Shade cells within a matrix.

      Pie chart

      Display each source’s contribution to a total.

    • Data

      Data table

      Display the raw data of a composed aggregation.

      Metric

      Display a single number.

    • Maps

      Tile map

      Associate the results of an aggregation with geographic locations.

    • Time Series

      Timelion

      Compute and combine data from multiple time series data sets.

      Time Series Visual Builder

      Visualize time series data using pipeline aggregations.

    • Other

      Tag cloud

      Display words as a cloud in which the size of the word correspond to its importance

      Markdown widget

      Display free-form information or instructions.

  4. Specify a search query to retrieve the data for your visualization:

    • To enter new search criteria, select the index pattern for the indices that contain the data you want to visualize. This opens the visualization builder with a wildcard query that matches all of the documents in the selected indices.

    • To build a visualization from a saved search, click the name of the saved search you want to use. This opens the visualization builder and loads the selected query.

      When you build a visualization from a saved search, any subsequent modifications to the saved search are automatically reflected in the visualization. To disable automatic updates, you can disconnect a visualization from the saved search.

  5. In the visualization builder, choose the metric aggregation for the visualization’s Y axis:

  6. For the visualizations X axis, select a bucket aggregation:

For example, if you’re indexing Apache server logs, you could build bar chart that shows the distribution of incoming requests by geographic location by specifying a terms aggregation on the geo.src field:

bar terms agg

The y-axis shows the number of requests received from each country, and the countries are displayed across the x-axis.

Bar, line, or area chart visualizations use metrics for the y-axis and buckets for the x-axis. Buckets are analogous to SQL GROUP BY statements. Pie charts, use the metric for the slice size and the bucket for the number of slices.

You can futher break down the data by specifying sub aggregations. The first aggregation determines the data set for any subsequent aggregations. Sub aggregations are applied in order—​you can drag the aggregations to change the order in which they’re applied.

For example, you could add a terms sub aggregation on the geo.dest field to the Country of Origin bar chart to see the locations those requests were targeting.

bar terms subagg

For more information about working with sub aggregations, see Kibana, Aggregation Execution Order, and You.

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