The ELKBeats Stack: K is for Kibana

Read the first item in this Table of Contents if you haven't been here before.

Table of Contents


Installing Kibana

Similar to previous installs (prerequisites):

apt-get update ; apt-get install kibana

Smallest package yet, although still among the largest on my server at 31M compressed. As with Logstash installing most or all of JRuby, the Kibana packagers seem to have ignored the purpose and function of the package system in favour of installing the entirety of Node.js. No configuration to do apparently.

# systemctl enable kibana # make it a permanent service
# systemctl start kibana  # run it now

Kibana doesn't do anything useful on its own (ie. if elasticsearch doesn't have a data source - either logstash or actual logs) but visit it at localhost:5601 to see that it's up and running. We'll give it some data to work with in the next step.

It appears the configuration file is /opt/kibana/config/kibana.yml - as I haven't modified it, I can't guarantee I'm correct on that. Logging is to /var/log/kibana/kibana.stdout and /var/log/kibana/kibana.stderr.


Continue to The ELKBeats Stack: Getting E, L, and K to play nice together, the next article in this series.