Visualizing data with Kibana

Kibana allows you to create reusable data representations called Visualizations. They are representations of aggregations and can be used to power up the dashboard with custom graphs.

Getting ready

You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup.

You also need a functional Kibana installation as described in Installing Kibana and X-Pack recipe. The X-Pack is not needed.

How to do it...

To use Kibana to create custom widgets, we will perform the following steps:

1. We access the Visualize section of Kibana as shown in the following screenshot:

   

2. Now we can choose the visualization that we want to create as shown in the following screenshot:

   

3. If we want to create a Tag cloud visualization, we select it and populate the required fields as shown in the following screenshot:

   

How it works...

Aggregations and searches can be grouped in the visualization widgets that can...