Kibana
A visualisation and dashboard tool for Elasticsearch.
Kibana renders dashboards, time-series charts, geographic maps, and graph explorations on top of Elasticsearch indices. It is the "K" in the ELK / Elastic Stack and is most commonly used as the front-end for log analysis, application observability, and SIEM workloads. The "Discover" view also lets analysts run ad-hoc queries against the data without writing code.
Kibana was started by Rashid Khan in 2013 as a separate front-end project and folded into Elastic shortly after. It follows the same release cadence and licensing as Elasticsearch — Apache 2.0 originally, Elastic Licence v2 / SSPL since 2021, AGPL-3.0 also offered since 2024. The OpenSearch project's "OpenSearch Dashboards" is the Apache-2.0 fork.
Beyond the core stack, Kibana has accumulated commercial features in higher-tier Elastic releases: Canvas for infographic-style dashboards, Maps for geospatial work, and APM for application performance monitoring. The base open-source release nonetheless covers most common log-analysis and metrics-dashboard use cases.
License: Elastic License v2 OR SSPL-1.0
Category: Observability
Website: https://www.elastic.co/kibana/
Install
Same APT/DNF repos as Elasticsearch: sudo apt install kibana sudo dnf install kibana Or via Docker: docker run -p 5601:5601 docker.elastic.co/kibana/kibana:8.11.0
Authors
- Elastic NV