kibana/docs/introduction.asciidoc

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[[introduction]]
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== Introduction
Kibana is an open source analytics and visualization platform designed to work
with Elasticsearch. You use Kibana to search, view, and interact with data
stored in Elasticsearch indexes. You can easily perform advanced data analysis
operations and visualize your data in a variety of charts, tables, and maps.
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Kibana makes it easy to understand large volumes of data. Its simple,
browser-based interface enables you to quickly create and share dynamic
dashboards that display changes to Elasticsearch queries in real time.
Setting up Kibana is a snap. You can install Kibana and start exploring your
Elasticsearch indexes in minutes--no code, no additional infrastructure required.
NOTE: This guide describes how to use Kibana 4. For information about what's new
in Kibana 4, see <<whats-new>>. For information about Kibana 3,
see the http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/kibana/current/index.html[Kibana 3 User Guide].
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=== Data Discovery and Visualization
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Let's take a look at how you might use Kibana to explore and visualize data.
We've indexed some data from Transport for London (TFL) that shows a week's
worth of transit (Oyster) card usage.
From Kibana's Discover page, we can submit search queries, filter the results, and
examine the data in the returned documents. For example, we can get all trips
completed by tube during the week by excluding incomplete trips and trips by bus:
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image::images/TFL-CompletedTrips.jpg[Discover]
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Right away, we can see the peaks for the morning and afternoon commute hours. By default,
the Discover page shows a time-series chart and the first 500 entries that match the
search criteria. You can change the time filter, interact with the chart to drill
down into the data, and view the details of particular documents. For more
information about exploring your data from the Discover page, see <<discover>>.
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You can construct visualizations of your search results from the Visualization page.
Each visualization is associated with a search. For example, we can create a histogram
that shows the weekly London commute traffic via tube using a search that excludes
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incomplete trips and trips by bus. The Y-axis is the number of trips. The X-axis shows
the day and time. By adding a sub-aggregation, we can see the top 3 end stations during
each hour:
image::images/TFL-CommuteHistogram.jpg[Visualize]
You can save and share visualizations and add them to dashboards to make it easy
to monitor and share particular metrics. For example, we could create a dashboard
that displays several visualizations of the TFL data:
image::images/TFL-Dashboard.jpg[Dashboard]
For more information about creating and sharing visualizations, see <<visualize>>.
For more information about working with Dashboards, see <<dashboard>>.