Chapter 5.  Metric Analytics with Metricbeat and Kibana 5.0

In the two previous chapters, we have seen how to use Kibana in order to visualize log data in the context of a business and a technical use case. We will now focus on metric analytics, which is fundamentally different in terms of data structure.

So, before starting this chapter, I would like to devote a few lines to the following question:

What is a metric?

A metric is an event that contains a timestamp and usually one or more numeric values. It is appended to a metric file sequentially, where all metric lines are ordered based on the timestamp. As an example, here are a few system metrics:

02:30:00 AM    all    2.58    0.00    0.70    1.12    0.05     95.55
02:40:00 AM    all    2.56    0.00    0.69    1.05    0.04     95.66
02:50:00 AM    all    2.64    0.00    0.65    1.15    0.05     95.50

Unlike logs, metrics are sent periodically, for example, every 10 minutes (as the preceding example illustrates) whereas logs...