[[introduction]]
== {kib}—your window into Elastic
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What is Kibana?
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{kib} enables you to give
shape to your data and navigate the Elastic Stack. With {kib}, you can:
* *Search, observe, and protect.*
From discovering documents to analyzing logs to finding security vulnerabilities,
{kib} is your portal for accessing these capabilities and more.
* *Visualize and analyze your data.*
Search for hidden insights, visualize what you've found in charts, gauges,
maps and more, and combine them in a dashboard.
* *Manage, monitor, and secure the Elastic Stack.*
Manage your indices and ingest pipelines, monitor the health of your
Elastic Stack cluster, and control which users have access to
which features.
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*{kib} is for administrators, analysts, and business users.*
As an admin, your role is to manage the Elastic Stack, from creating your
deployment to getting {es} data into {kib}, and then
managing the data. As an analyst, your job is to discover insights
in the data, visualize your data on dashboards, and share your findings. As a business user,
you want to view existing dashboards and drill down into details.
*{kib} works with all types of data.* Your data can be structured or unstructured text,
numerical data, time-series data, geospatial data, logs, metrics, security events,
and more. Kibana is designed to use Elasticsearch as a data store.
No matter your data, {kib} can help you uncover patterns and relationships and visualize the results.
[float]
[[kibana-home-page]]
=== Where to start
Start with the home page, where you’re presented options for adding your data.
You can collect data from an app or service or upload a file that contains your data.
If you’re not ready to use your own data, you can add a sample data set.
The home page provides access to the *Enterprise Search*, *Observability*, and *Security* solutions,
and everything you need to visualize and analyze your data.
To access all of {kib} features, use the main menu.
Open this menu by clicking the
menu icon.
For a quick reference of all {kib} features, refer to <>
[role="screenshot"]
image::images/kibana-main-menu.png[Kibana main menu]
[float]
[[extend-your-use-case]]
=== Search, observe, and protect
Being able to search, observe, and protect your data is a requirement for any analyst.
{kib} provides solutions for each of these use cases.
* https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/enterprise-search/current/index.html[*Enterprise Search*] enables you to create a search experience for your app, workplace, and website.
* {observability-guide}/observability-introduction.html[*Elastic Observability*] enables you to monitor and apply analytics in real time
to events happening across all your environments. You can analyze log events, monitor the performance metrics for the host or container
that it ran in, trace the transaction, and check the overall service availability.
* Designed for security analysts, {security-guide}/es-overview.html[*Elastic Security*] provides an overview of
the events and alerts from your environment. Elastic Security helps you defend
your organization from threats before damage and loss occur.
[float]
[[visualize-and-analyze]]
=== Visualize and analyze
Data analysis is a core functionality of {kib}.
You can quickly search through large amounts of data, explore fields and values,
and then use {kib}’s drag-and-drop interface to rapidly build charts, tables, metrics, and more.
[role="screenshot"]
image::images/visualization-journey.png[User data analysis journey]
[[get-data-into-kibana]]
[cols=2*]
|===
| *1*
| *Add data.* The best way to add {es} data to {kib} is to use one of our guided processes,
available from the <>.
| *2*
| *Explore.* With <>, you can search your data for hidden
insights and relationships. Ask your questions, and then filter the results to just the data you want.
You can limit your results to the most recent documents added to {es}.
| *3*
| *Visualize.* {kib} provides many options to create visualizations of your data, from
aggregation-based data to time series data.
<> is your starting point to create visualizations,
and then pulling them together to show your data from multiple perspectives.
| *4*
| *Present.* With <