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Kibana

A visualisation and dashboard tool for Elasticsearch.

Kibana logo

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
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