Kibana setup

Installation

Get Kibana

Download the latest version of Kibana: http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/kibana/installation/

By the time of this writting, latest release is v3.1.2

cd /opt
wget https://download.elasticsearch.org/kibana/kibana/kibana-3.1.2.zip
unzip kibana-3.1.2.zip
rm kibana-3.1.2.zip
ln -s /opt/kibana-3.1.2 /opt/kibana

Kibana root configuration

Set the "elasticSearch" URL.

cp /opt/kibana/config.js /opt/kibana/config.js.backup
vim /opt/kibana/config.js

Adjust and replace elasticSearch value, ~ line 32.

elasticsearch: 'http://' + window.location.hostname + ':9200',

!!! IMPORTANT !!! You MUST not use a hard-coded IP @ in that elasticsearch string!

Special thanks to my collegue Julien Rialland for this part! :)

Apache2 configuration

Either you create a new configuration or your update a VirtualHost configuration. Like Zabbix does, I chose to use a configuration for kibana rather than a VHost change.

cd /etc/apache2/conf-available
vim kibana.conf

Put the following content:

# Kibana application
<IfModule mod_alias.c>
    Alias /kibana /opt/kibana
</IfModule>

<Directory "/opt/kibana">
    Options FollowSymLinks
    Require all granted

    php_value max_execution_time 300
    php_value memory_limit 128M
    php_value post_max_size 16M
    php_value upload_max_filesize 2M
    php_value max_input_time 300
    php_value date.timezone Europe/Stockholm
</Directory>

Enable Apache2 configuration:

a2enconf kibana
service apache2 reload

Test installation (1st run)

Source: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/kibana/current/using-kibana-for-the-first-time.html

Create fake data and import it into ElastiSearch

curl -XPUT http://localhost:9200/shakespeare -d '
{
 "mappings" : {
  "_default_" : {
   "properties" : {
    "speaker" : {"type": "string", "index" : "not_analyzed" },
    "play_name" : {"type": "string", "index" : "not_analyzed" },
    "line_id" : { "type" : "integer" },
    "speech_number" : { "type" : "integer" }
   }
  }
 }
}
';

wget http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/kibana/current/snippets/shakespeare.json

curl -XPUT localhost:9200/_bulk --data-binary @shakespeare.json

Display data

• Access the Kibana web page on http://192.168.1.203/kibana
• Go to the sample dashboard

Image: ElasticSearch

• If you see anything: Kibana is working good with your ElasticSearch!! :)

Image: ElasticSearch

More guidelines

Check-out the official ElasticSearch website: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/kibana/current/using-kibana-for-the-first-time.html

Setup dashboards

Now you can either customize the dashboard or set the logstash view as default.

Set logstash dashboard as default

To set the logstash dashboard as default, just do:

cd /opt/kibana/app/dashboard
cp default.json default.json.backup
cp logstash.json default.json

If you haven't configure Logstash yet you should see an empty page! :-)

Bug fixes

Connection time-out

You might encounter some Netty connection time-out error... :S That might be due to a wrong config.js ... You should try to put Kibana on another computer and debug from it.

References

• Official documentation: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/kibana/current/using-kibana-for-the-first-time.html