Kibana is a dashboard tool that's easy to use and works closely with Elasticsearch. We can use Kibana for different use cases, such as system monitoring and application monitoring. Kibana isn't just a visualization tool, it also creates a complete monitoring ecosystem when we leverage the power of Elastic Stack. Here's a small example: you're working on a project where you can't tolerate any outrage, be it due to the database, application, system-related issues, or anything related to the application's performance. In a traditional monitoring system, you can monitor system performance, application logs, and so on. But with Kibana and Elastic Stack, we can do following:
- Configure Beats to monitor system metrics, database metrics, and log metrics
- Configure APM to monitor your application metrics and issues if your application platform is supported
- Configure the JDBC plugin of Logstash to pull RDBMS data into Elasticsearch to make it available to Kibana for creating visualizations on KPIs
- There are different third-party plugins that help us to get data from those sources, for example, you can use the Twitter plugin to get Twitter feeds
- You can create alerts for certain thresholds, so that whenever that situation occurs, you get alerts so you don't have to continuously monitor the application
- You can apply machine learning on your data to get data anomalies or future trends by analyzing the current dataset
