Kibana
Kibana is the visualization and exploration UI for the Elastic Stack. It builds dashboards, discovers log patterns, and runs queries against Elasticsearch indices. We assess it when an Elastic estate already exists; greenfield observability defaults to Grafana with OpenTelemetry backends.
Blurb
Kibana is your window into the Elastic Stack. Explore, visualize, and build dashboards on the data in Elasticsearch.
Summary
What it is: Web UI for search, visualizations, dashboards, and Elastic-specific features (APM, SIEM modules in commercial tiers).
When to use: Committed Elastic Cloud or self-hosted Elasticsearch; security analytics on Elastic data; teams standardized on KQL and Elastic dashboards.
When to skip: New stacks without Elastic lock-in. Prefer Grafana plus Prometheus, Loki, or vendor-neutral stores.
Key features: Lens visualizations, saved objects, role-based spaces, alerting tied to Elastic indices.
Details
| Topic | Notes |
|---|---|
| Deploy | Bundled with Elastic Stack or Elastic Cloud |
| Pairing | Requires Elasticsearch (or serverless Elastic) as the data layer |
| Auth | Elastic native, SAML, OIDC in commercial tiers |
References