Setup Kibana in windows

What is Kibana

• Kibana is the data exploration, visualization and administration tool for the Elasticsearch database
• Kibana for Elasticsearch is just like sqldeveloper for Oracle, pgAdmin for PostgreSQL, phpMyAdmin for MySQL
• Interactive dashboards with customizable visualizations like line chart, bar chart, pie chart, maps, heatmap etc. can be created with Kibana over Elasticsearch data
• Users can use Kibana to gain valuable insights on Elasticsearch data without any coding skills

Download Kibana

• Kibana is basically a web server. It can be downloaded as a zip file
• It can be downloaded from https://www.elastic.co/downloads/kibana

Create password for ‘kibana_system’ user in Elasticsearch

• In Elasticsearch bin folder, run the command elasticsearch-reset-password -i -u kibana_system and reset the password for the “kibana_system” elasticsearch user

Configure Kibana

• Extract the Kibana zip file contents to C drive. For example C:\Kibana-8.10.2
• In the config folder, open kibana.yml file
• The following configurations can be done in the kibana.yml file

Setup Elasticsearch connectivity

• Set the username and password of “kibana_system” user in elasticsearch.username and elasticsearch.password fields of the kibana.yml file
• Set the Elasticsearch URL in elasticsearch.hosts field
• Keep elasticsearch.ssl.verificationMode to none to skip the Elasticsearch SSL verification check

Change the port of Kibana

• Change the server.port attribute in kibana.yml file in the config folder to change the port on which Kibana will listen for requests. The default port for Kibana is 5601

Control remote connections to Kibana

• Keep the server.host attribute to ‘localhost’ to make remote connections not allowed
• Keep the server.host attribute to the LAN IP address (like 192.168.3.26) to allow connections from local LAN

Run Kibana from command line

• After configuring the elasticsearch connectivity, open a command line in the bin folder of Kibana and run the command kibana.bat
• This will run Kibana from the command line
• Kibana can be checked in the browser. For example, we can open localhost:5601 to check if Kibana is working

Setup Kibana as a windows background service with nssm

• Download nssm exe file from https://nssm.cc/download and place it in C drive (Example: C:\nssm\nssm.exe)
• Open a command line with administrative privilege in the folder with nssm.exe and run the command nssm install kibana_service. A popup will open to create a windows service.
• In the Application tab, Enter the path of kibana.bat and the folder of kibana.bat as shown below

• In the I/O tab, enter the path of a log file where the service logs will be stored. For this purpose, create a folder in kibana folder (like service_logs) and create a blank log file (say kibana_service.log)

• In the File rotation tab, check all the boxes and enter 10485760 bytes, so that a new log file will be generated for every 5 MB of logs.

• Finally click the Install service button to create a windows service for kibana
• Go to the Services app in windows, search for kibana_service service, right click and start the service
• Right click on the service and open the properties to change the startup type as Automatic to make the Kibana service run automatically upon system startup
• Verify if Kibana is running in the browser (say localhost:5601)

Video

You can see the video for this post here

References

• Kibana installation guide - https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/windows.html
• Kibana download page - https://www.elastic.co/downloads/kibana
• Kibana configuration guide - https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/settings.html
• Kibana install as service with sc command - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29261809/elastic-kibana-install-as-windows-service
• official Kibana learning videos - https://www.elastic.co/videos/training-how-to-series-stack?elektra=kibana-dashboard&storm=hero