Chapter 2. Installing and Setting Up Kibana 5.0

In this chapter, we'll go through all the installation steps required to use Kibana. At the time of writing, version 5.0 has not yet been released; however, Elastic's terrific R&D team will bring to the user a pre-release of the major version in the form of an alpha or beta version. Therefore, I'm able to use the 5.0.0-alpha4 version to illustrate the majority of what you will get in 5.0.

Setting up Kibana 5.0 also requires that you set up Elasticsearch as well, configuring security in order to integrate Elasticsearch and Kibana, as shown in the following diagram:

Kibana and Elasticsearch integration

Setting up your installation

In this section, we'll download and install Elasticsearch, Kibana, and the X-Pack.

Downloading the software

Downloading the binaries is pretty straightforward; you just need to get on the Elastic website on the following pages:

• For Elasticsearch: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch. On this page, you will find the current GA version, which might be a 5.x by the time you read this book. In my case, I'll download 5.0.0-alpha4:

  

  Elasticsearch 5.0.0-alpha4 download page

• For Kibana: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/kibana. As for Elasticsearch, I'm going to download 5.0.0-alpha4:

  

  Kibana 5.0.0-alpha4 download page

I recommend that you move the downloaded file to the same folder. In my case, I've moved everything to the /Users/Bahaaldine/packt folder:

pc55:packt bahaaldine$ pwd
/Users/bahaaldine/packt
pc55:packt bahaaldine$ ls
elasticsearch-5.0.0-alpha4.tar.gz  kibana-5.0.0-alpha4-darwin-
      x64.tar.gz

You can now proceed to both Elasticsearch and Kibana...

Kibana anatomy

In this section, I'll present the different sections present in Kibana 5.0, without necessarily diving into them, as we are going to do this later in the chapters dedicated to logging, metrics, and graphs.

First, connect to https://localhost:5601, log in with the default elastic / changeme, and let's see what the Kibana menu is composed of:

Kibana menu

The Kibana menu contains two types of sections:

• Links to Kibana core features: Discover, Visualize, Dashboard, and Console

• Links to Kibana plugins: Timelion, Graph, Monitoring, the elastic user, and Logout

Before we start, let's go into a common Kibana user experience:

Kibana user experience

Since Kibana 5.0, the user can have a seamless experience, from ingestion to visualization, all from Kibana itself:

• If the user doesn't have data yet, he can import it using the CSV importer (only available in Kibana alpha version; has been removed in 5.0 GA).

• If the data already exists in Elasticsearch, the user needs to create their index...

Summary

So far, we have looked at an example of the theory behind data-driven architecture in which Elasticsearch and Kibana play a key role: first at the storage layer, and second for the visualization section.

We also installed and set up Elasticstack, and walked through the different core and plugin components.

In the following chapters, we'll start implementing real-life use cases, starting with the logging use case, using accidentology data to try to understand the patterns of accidents that happen in Paris.