[[introduction]]
== 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 indices. You can easily perform advanced data analysis 
and visualize your data in a variety of charts, tables, and maps.

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 indices in minutes -- no code, no additional infrastructure required. 

NOTE: This guide describes how to use Kibana 4.2. For information about what's new
in Kibana 4.2, see the <<releasenotes, release notes>>. For earlier versions of Kibana 4, see the 
http://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/4.1/index.html[Kibana 4.1 User Guide]. For information about Kibana 3, see the 
http://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/3.0/index.html[Kibana 3 User Guide].

[float]
[[data-discovery]]
=== Data Discovery and Visualization

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 one week 
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 the Tube during the week by excluding incomplete trips and trips by bus:

image:images/TFL-CompletedTrips.jpg[Discover]

Right away, we can see the peaks for the morning and afternoon commute hours in the 
histogram. By default, the Discover page also shows the first 500 entries that match the 
search criteria. You can change the time filter, interact with the histogram 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, Discover>>.

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 the Tube using our previous search. 
The Y-axis shows 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 combine them into dashboards to make it easy
to correlate related information. 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 and dashboards, see the <<visualize, Visualize>> 
and <<dashboard, Dashboard>> topics. A complete <<getting-started,tutorial>> covering several aspects of Kibana's 
functionality is also available.
