Visualizing data with dashboards

Dashboards in Kibana are the primary tool to visualize datasets in order to understand what the data means. Users generally spend a significant chunk of their time on Kibana working with dashboards; well-designed dashboards can efficiently communicate important metrics, trends in activity, and any potential issues to look out for.

The Nginx dashboard shown in the following screenshot (available out of the box) visualizes source geo-locations, web server response codes over time, common error types, and top resources accessed on the web server. An engineer eyeballing this data can spot something out of the ordinary. If, for example, HTTP 5xx response codes suddenly start increasing for a given resource on the server, the engineer can quickly narrow down potential issues and proceed to fix them before end users are impacted:

Figure 8.5 – Nginx logs dashboard

Dashboards are designed to work interactively. Most visualizations...