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In this guide to the best Kibana dashboards examples around, we wanted to show you some of the most ingenious ways to use Kibana within your organisation to explore a wide range of ways that data and metrics can be centralised from every corner of your organisation.

Whether you are a technical lead looking to pinpoint the cause of spike alerts being triggered or a business intelligence specialist wishing to identify which products are the most profitable, Kibana can be used for such a wide range of activities that we are sure this roundup will leave you surprised at the sheer potential of this leading data visualisation tool.

Contents

What is a Kibana dashboard?

A Kibana dashboard provides a way of relaying data in the form of visualisations and saved searches. Kibana provides a wealth of options for those that want to display data in a wide variety of formats including line and pie charts, heat maps, data tables, line graphs, gauges, coordinate maps and tag clouds.

To show you just what Kibana dashboards can be used for we’ve collected the top twenty four Kibana visualisation examples you can get started with today!

1. Tracking The Number Of COVID-19 Cases

coviddashboard (1) Credit: @CarlosCilleruelo

Easily the biggest news of last year was the global COVID-19 pandemic that swept across the globe.

With so many cases occurring each day, many notable organisations wished to be able to report internally on the cases by country alongside other key metrics (such as deaths overall and the total number of those that had recovered so far).

This dashboard uses ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash & Kibana) as an alternative to ArcGIS to create a real time pandemic map.

This pandemic map displays cases by country alongside updated metrics captured in the previous 48 hours.

This dashboard also shows the top countries for recovered cases as well as the leading countries by the number of deaths. The world map is also configured to indicate the infection rate by the concentration of colour.

2. SIEM Dashboard

siemdashboard Credit: @Ibrahim.Ayadhi

Security analysts can use this Kibana example dashboard to start to implement SIEM as a Service to protect their organisation’s security and improve observability.

This dashboard can be configured to show what processes are currently running by name, the top processes by the event logs being generated as well as the event codes associated with the most common logs.

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3. Measuring Votes By Region

votedashboard Credit: @itseranga

When the creator of this dashboard wished to monitor which districts of his country are contributing the most votes, they turned to Kibana & the ELK Stack to visualise these metrics using the map visualisation format to display colour coding to reflect voter density.

This visualisation type could easily be used to track these same metrics in other countries across the globe. In keeping with the spirit of open source, the original contributor of this dashboard welcomes collaboration on his original Gitlab repo.

4. Monitoring Website Uptime

uptimedashboard Credit: @AnuragSrivastava

For organisations looking to reduce risk and minimise downtime, monitoring the uptime of your website is essential.

Too many websites still don’t have reliable uptime monitoring and may be in the process of comparing several solutions.

Thankfully Kibana makes affordable uptime monitoring possible for everyone in this tutorial on creating this highly useful alerting dashboard.

5. Visualising IMDB Movie Data

imdbdashboard Credit: @AnnapooraniK

The ELK Stack can also be used for more casual purposes outside of technical analysis in the workplace, as this dashboard comparing IMDB movie data shows.

This dashboard uses Kibana alongside Virtualbox and Ubuntu to access and import the IMDB dataset for parsing and processing within Logstash.

From here it is easy to discover who are the top three directors per year, which countries distribute the most movies and which genres are the most popular overall.

6. Tracking Twitter Tweets + Word Cloud Creation

socialmediadashboard Credit: @ArezouSoltaniPanah

If you’ve discovered much like myself that online tools for generating Twitter word clouds can be lacking in their reliability and formatting then you’ll find this dashboard for displaying the most commonly mentioned keywords indispensable.

This Kibana based social media dashboard also displays the total number of tweets and allows you to choose from time graphs and time-series visualisation to display the number of tweets being published by the hour as well as a geographic map highlighting the most active regions tweets are being sent from.

7. Linux Logs Monitoring

linuxdashboard (1) Credit: @AntoineSolnichkin This dashboard created to measure Linux log activity is vital for improving your awareness of network infrastructure to implement comprehensive infrastructure monitoring for your organisation.

Visualisations can be used to make the following Linux Logs more human-readable so that you and your wider team can make actionable changes seamlessly: generic log messages, authentication logs, rebooting data, failed login attempts as well as MySQL related logs.

8. Measuring Sales Performance For An eCommerce Retailer

ecommercedashboard (1) Credit: @KidongLee

Every eCommerce store owner knows how vital it is to make sure that they have full visibility of which products are driving the most success for their store.

The Kibana dashboard shown here can be configured to display how many products are sold per day, product sales split by Gender of the purchaser, average sale price and quantity per order as well as which categories are performing most successfully.

9. Understanding User Behaviour

userdashboard (1) Credit: @RuanBekker

If you are in charge of measuring digital content performance for your organisation then you’ll need a reporting dashboard that measures the activity being taken by users on your website.

You’ll also need visibility of your top traffic referrers, 404 errors and the most popular pages being viewed.

This dashboard supports the display of all of these metrics and more and like all of the other examples in this list can be customised as flexibly as you need to display the metrics that matter most to you.

10. Automated Test Tracking

testingdashboard (1) Credit: @MesutGunes

As a software developer running unit tests, you’ll know how vital is it to measure if they ran successfully.

A monitoring system for displaying the logs created from running automated tasks and unit tests uses the data being created by your system to make it far easier to monitor, debug and report on why tests aren't working as expected.

11. Tracking Sign-Ups By Referrer Visualisation

referraldashboard (1) Credit: @AmitRathi

This Kibana example can be used alongside affiliate marketing software or general marketing dashboard as this visualisation provides valuable insights to the user by showing the traffic sources behind an increase in successful sign-ups.

12. Centralized Analytics for COBOL Microservices

coboldashboard (1) Credit: @OlegKunitsyn

Even though COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages around, this still doesn’t mean that it has died out of usage, on the contrary, roles requiring programmers with COBOL as part of their skillset experienced a massive surge in demand in 2020.

These new hires were especially required by Government agencies whose legacy systems were crashing at the time COVID-19 first hit.

This dashboard is used by those creating COBOL microservice to display when filesystem errors occurred, when microservices start or are unable to handle a request and when computing errors arise.

13. Data Streaming Dashboard

datadashboard (1) Credit: @AbhishekBose

This powerful dashboard consists of not only Kibana but also uses Python and Apache Kafka alongside to power this highly robust data streaming pipeline.

14. Kubernetes Monitoring

kubernetesdashboard (1) __Credit: __@ArunKumarSingh

One commonly known feature of Kibana is its use as a monitoring tool for Kubernetes. For this Kubernetes cluster manager example, Metricbeat is used to collect metrics from operating systems, services and data sources before you use Logstash to parse and enrich your data before it is forwarded to Elasticsearch and Kibana.

15. Airline Flight Metrics Dashboard

airlinedashboard (1) Credit: @AndyKwan

One of the more common use cases of Elasticsearch and Kibana that you may have previously heard of is the airline flight reporting dashboard.

This dashboard aggregates the flight destination’s weather forecast as a word cloud to surface which weather is the most prevalent currently.

This particular dashboard also tracks flight delays and which airline companies are most active.

16. Visitors by State & Country

geodashboard (1) Credit: @Chestermo

If you are a marketing professional then it is likely that you are already familiar with the Google Analytics report for showing website visitors by geographic region.

If you are looking for a visualisation tool to use as an alternative to Google Analytics (especially in light of their recent push to GA 4) then you’ll love using this Kibana dashboard.

Visualise the same visitor geographic data more intuitively within an open-source based dashboard that isn’t pushing for limiting the way you can view or customisation the filters that you can apply to your data.

17. Jenkins Application Monitoring

jenkinsdashboard (1) Credit: @SouravAtta

Users of the popular software deployment tool Jenkins often wish to view which deployment jobs ran successfully, failed or were launched unstably as well as jobs that are running frequently in the background, this Kibana & Elasticsearch dashboard captures all of these insights to be shared with your wider development and DevOps team members.

18. Saving The Planet By Allocating Resources More Efficiently

greenenergydashboard (1) Credit: @CharlesGerber

The author of this post does a brilliant job of explaining how they used the ability to visualise their most busy apps to reduce their overall energy consumption costs by 75%, saving their organisation from producing 3 tons of C02 per year!

We can all agree that when analysis leads to reducing your organisation’s overall carbon footprint then this is something we should all be doing more often to prevent climate change.

19. Vulnerability Scanning

threatdashboard (1) Credit: @FilipPytloun

For DevOps & cybersecurity professionals looking for a highly customisable way to conduct vulnerability scanning, we hope that this example shows that Kibana is a more than suitable alternative to using more costly out of the box security solutions.

In this Medium post, the original creator of this dashboard details how when they were looking for a PCI and SOC-2 compliant security solution for scanning their Kubernetes based microservices that the author initially tried to use a commercial tool and found that there wasn't enough support for several tools they already used.

At the end of their evaluation, they found that it was well worth using Kibana to build out their dashboards to implement comprehensive vulnerability scanning built using open-source technology.

20. Recovering Data For Over 6000 Users

datarecoverydashboard Credit: @GaetanoPiazzolla

The writer behind this Medium post details how after launching an ill-fated code release they suffered a huge loss of user data, this example may not be a reporting dashboard, but nevertheless provides a fascinating use case for the Elastic Stack!

After the initial disaster, they found that they were able to recapture the user data that would have otherwise been permanently lost as they still had access to the data stored in Elasticsearch & Kibana.

As a result of using the ELK Stack alongside some measures to automate the recovery process, they were able to successfully recover over 95% of the data they were in danger of losing originally.

21. Server Monitoring

serverdashboard (1) Credit: @FrancoMartin

This example of a Kibana dashboard displays all of the most essential attributes of a server monitoring system.

Server monitoring is an essential service often required by solutions architects and system administrators to view how their servers are using resources such as CPU & disk usage, memory consumption, I/0 & other closely related processes.

22. Firewall Monitoring Dashboard

Firewall Credit: @JoeB-

Monitoring key firewall metrics can have a direct impact on how efficient you are at protecting your network. By identifying potential security threats and events as they spike you can take steps to be proactive in tightening system security.

This Firewall monitoring dashboard can be configured to display blocked events by region, total blocked event count, events blocked by country, top 15 blocked ports and an overall timeline of blocked events as well as a variety of other key charts.

23. Netflow Traffic Dashboard

Netflow Credit: @JoeB-

NetFlow is a popular network protocol used to collect IP traffic. As this is a one-way technology, it can be difficult to monitor Netflow without the use of a specialised analytics dashboard. This Netflow monitoring dashboard provides visibility so that anyone managing Netflow can resolve conditions such as congestion and over-usage.

In this Kibana dashboard we can configure charts to display the following metrics from Netflow; traffic down by region, timeline area chart, traffic down by domain, traffic down by local host as well as traffic up by local host.

24. SSH Security Dashboard

ssh-security-dashboard Credit: @Jeroen van Kessel

25. EXIF Data Dashboard

Screenshot 2023-06-12 at 15.46.57

While Kibana supports various data types, including structured and unstructured data, it doesn't have built-in support for visualizing EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) data directly. However, users can still use Kibana to visualize EXIF data by extracting and transforming the relevant information into a format that Kibana can handle.

Want to get started with creating your own Kibana dashboards? Then why not learn more about how Kibana as a Service can help your organisation grow?

If you enjoyed this post then why not check out our guide to Kibana query syntax or our article on how to configure an index pattern in Kibana?

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