Did you know that 93 percent of data transmitted to our brains is visual? That is why data visualization is so important.
Data visualization allows you to track your logs and data points quickly and easily. Using the data you are visualizing, you can make quick decisions that will help improve your business or organization and push it towards continuous success.
Kibana is software like Grafana, Tableau, Power BI, Qlikview, and others. It is an open-source tool that allows you to build data visualization dashboards. You can put whatever kind of data you want onto these dashboards.
Kibana dashboards allow you to visualize many types of data in one place. You can customize the dashboard based on your needs.
Best Kibana Dashboard Examples
In this article, I will go over 16 Kibana dashboard examples to take inspiration from. Let us get into it.
1. Global Flight Data
This dashboard from Elastic shows flight data. It can be used by airlines, airport workers, and travelers looking for information about flights.
It can also be used by analysts studying flight activity and passenger travel habits and patterns.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard provides an overview of flight data from around the world. Some data points presented in this dashboard include:
- Airline Carrier: A graph displaying the different airlines flying from a certain origin to a certain destination, including the market share of each airline. For example, you can see what percentage of flights are flown by JetBlue and what percentage are flown by American Airlines.
- Flight Count and Ticket Price: See how many flights are flown at certain timestamps. Also, see how much flights cost at different times. For example, you may find that overnight flights cost less due to fewer people wanting a red-eye flight.
- Total Flights: The total flights flown in the selected date range.
Average Ticket Price: The average flight price, per ticket, in the selected date range. - Total Flight Delays
- Total Flight Cancellations
- Delays and Cancellations: A graph displaying how frequent delays and cancellations were based on time.
- Delay Type: This graph is very helpful for understanding why delays occurred. How many delays were due to a security problem vs. an incoming flight arriving late? There are other reasons as well, such as bad weather.
- Airport Connections: For flights originating in X city and ending in Y city, where did stopovers occur? This map shows dots on the map where stopovers occurred.
- Destination Weather
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- This dashboard helps viewers understand things such as flight price average, where stopovers occur, and many other data types related to airline activity
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2. Ecommerce Revenue Dashboard
This is another Kibana sample visualization dashboard from Elastic (makers of Kibana). This is the dashboard you would use if you owned an eCommerce business and wanted to track your data, revenue, and performance in one place using Kibana.
What This Dashboard Does
Using this dashboard, you will be able to see how well your eCommerce business is performing. You will see whether you are selling enough products per day to meet your target and earning enough revenue to be successful.
Here are some of the stats this dashboard shows you:
- How many products sold per day
- Average spend per order
- Average number of items sold per order
- Sales by gender: How many males vs. females made up your customer base for any given time period
- Sales by category: See which categories are performing better than other, less popular categories
- Total revenue in dollars
- Sales count map: See on a map where your customers are located geographically
- Top selling products: See which products are most popular
- Order log: A full log of all orders made in the selected time range, with all applicable data
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- This dashboard is an excellent way to see how your store is improving
- You can figure out your target audience, including their geographical location and gender
- You can discover which products and categories are not performing well so you can remove them from your site
You Might Want To Read: Best Tableau Sales Dashboard Examples
3. Web Traffic Logs
This is another awesome sample dashboard from Elastic. It’s the dashboard to use if you want to visualize your website traffic and see the activity of your website visitors.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard shows you logs of your website visitors. It also allows you to visualize important information related to your website visitors.
Some data you can visualize in this dashboard includes:
- Total visitors: Total for the date range selected, and for selected operating system and country, shown in a speedometer format.
- Visitors by operating system: This chart shows you the percentage of visitors for each operating system. How many mobile vs. desktop users are you getting? How many are using Android vs. iOS? How many are using Windows 8 vs. Windows 10?
- Heatmap: This shows you where your visitors are coming from at different times of the day.
- Source and Destination Chart: Where your visitors are landing on vs. where they end up as they journey throughout your website. Helps you understand visitor journey flow.
- Visitors map: See a geographical map showing where your visitors are located. You can see if there are clusters in a specific region, for example.
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- This dashboard allows you to track visitor activity and understand the customer journey from when they land on your site until they exit.
- You can gain valuable information into where your visitors are coming from, what times of the day they are visiting your site, and what devices they are using.
Worth Reading: Best Tableau Retail Dashboard Examples
4. Elastic Demo Dashboard
The Elastic demo dashboard allows you to create your own visualizations, adding your own visualization types and data sources. It is a great way to get an idea of how to use Kibana and create a dashboard.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard gives you a chance to create your own visualization. You don’t need to download any software to use this demo dashboard.
Neither do you need to create an account or have a special type of operating system.
Instead, you can add visualizations such as maps, lines, metrics, heat maps, and more. Select the lens option if you really want to play around.
You can drag and drop fields such as timestamps and create x/y-axis charts.
How People Responded To This Dashboard
- This dashboard makes it easy to get a feel for using Elastic Kibana dashboards.
- You can play around with various fields and visualizations until you find a setup that works for you.
- No signup or payment is required to use this demo dashboard.
5. Azure Monitoring Dashboard
The Azure Monitoring dashboard example pulls data from Azure and helps you visualize that data in an easy to understand manner. You can keep track of user activity and more.
What This Dashboard Does
Some of the data you can see in this dashboard includes:
- Total logs over time
- Access request logs: See when they went up based on timestamp.
- Top active users: See which users are the most active.
- New changes: See things such as the number of new subscriptions and users.
How People Responded To This Dashboard
- If you use Azure, Kibana provides an easy way to visualize an overview of the data you are monitoring, with real-time updates.
6. API Server Requests Dashboard
This dashboard helps you visualize data that breaks down API server requests over time. It’s a great way to track the performance of an API.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard helps you track your API server request activity. You can see data such as:
- Average response time in milliseconds
- Requests rate
- Visualize data in different forms, including gauges (which are like speedometers), time series charts, and metric totals
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- It is easy to display API server request metrics in different methods, add data types, and edit the way the data is visualized.
7. Metricbeat Apache Dashboard
This dashboard helps you visualize data from an Apache server. Apache is an open-source cross-platform web software server.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard lets you see data such as:
- A hostname list with an events count
- Total accesses for the date range selected
- Total bytes for the date range selected
- Uptime
- Busy workers and idle workers based on time
- Total CPU usage, including CPU load, CPU user, CPU system, and more, with timestamps
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- It is one of the best visualization dashboards for the Apache server.
8. Google Cloud Storage Dashboard
This dashboard is for visualizing data related to your Google Cloud storage.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard allows you to visualize data such as:
- Total size of objects
- See which objects take up the most space
- Total number of objects
- API request count (compare objects)
- Number of bytes received and sent over the network
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- Using this dashboard will help you visualize your Google Cloud storage in an easy to understand manner, with all of your most important data points in one place.
9. Google Cloud Compute Overview
As opposed to the previous dashboard, this dashboard helps you visualize your Google Cloud Compute metrics. These two dashboards should be used in tandem to help you track your overall Google Cloud data.
What This Dashboard Does
Using this dashboard, you can see data visualizations such as:
- Average uptime
- CPU utilization – see what is utilizing the CPU most
- Read and Write I/O
- Sent and Received Bytes
- Firewall dropped bytes with timestamps
- Firewall dropped packets
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- When launching virtual machines with Google Cloud Compute, this Elastic Kibana visualization dashboard will help you track its performance.
10. Kubernetes Dashboard
Kubernetes was originally designed by Google. It is an open-source system for deploying and scaling computer applications automatically.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard helps you visualize metrics related to Kubernetes performance, such as:
- Nodes
- Deployments
- Available pods
- Unavailable pods
- Available and unavailable pods per deployment
- CPU usage (by node)
- Memory usage (by node)
- Top pods using up CPU
- Top pods using up memory
11. Docker Dashboard
Docker is a standalone software that runs containerized applications.
Docker is different from Kubernetes in several ways. For example, Kubernetes runs across a cluster, while Docker runs on a single node.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard helps you track Docker data. You can see metrics such as:
- Docker containers, along with CPU usage percentage and memory usage percentage
- Total number of containers, including the total number of running, paused, and stopped containers
- Memory usage and CPU usage graphs
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- Visualizing container data from Docker all in one place can be hard, but this Kibana dashboard makes it not only possible but easy
12. Prometheus Dashboard
Prometheus is a very popular software that is used for monitoring systems and alerts. It is free and provides real-time alerts and records metrics in real time.
What This Dashboard Does
The Prometheus dashboard uses Prometheus as a data source to populate the dashboard. You can pull data from Prometheus, regardless of what you are using Prometheus to monitor.
Some of the metrics you might pull from Prometheus and populate your dashboard with might include:
- HTTP requests
- Query durations
- Number of targets
- Reload and failure counts
- Alert notifications
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- Although there are many dashboards that Prometheus users can visualize Prometheus data with, the Kibana Prometheus dashboard has a simple interface that is free of clutter. It makes it easy to visualize the data you are monitoring with Prometheus.
13. DNS Network Data
The DNS network data dashboard allows you to visualize DNS data, such as queries, requests, and questions.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard allows you to visualize all of these data types, and more, in one place:
- DNS query count
- DNS query client and server bytes
- Average response times
- DNS requests status with timestamps (ok vs error)
- DNS question types displayed in a pie chart format
- Histogram displaying minimum, maximum, and average response time, with timestamps
- Top questions list
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- This dashboard helps you keep track of errors, slow response times at certain timestamps, and other helpful DNS network data
14. HTTP Network Data
The HTTP network data dashboard, like the DNS network data, helps you keep track of HTTP networking.
What This Dashboard Does
Using this dashboard, you can visualize data such as:
- HTTP transactions, displayed in a bar graph with timestamps
- HTTP status codes for top queries
- Total count of HTTP transactions
- HTTP error codes
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- Although this dashboard is simple, it is very helpful for getting an overview of HTTP transactions and errors
15. Nginx Dashboard
Nginx is a web server that accelerates content delivery, boosts security, is a mail proxy, and more. It can serve as a reverse proxy and HTTP cache, among others.
It allows for quick delivery of static content, while not using up a lot of resources. That is one reason it is so popular.
The Nginx dashboard allows you to visualize Nginx activity in one place.
What This Dashboard Does
Some of the data represented in the Nginx Kibana dashboard example include:
- Active connections with timestamps
- Request rate graph
- Drops rate
- Reading, writing, and waiting rates
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- Nginx is known to be more than two times faster than Apache, so for those who use Nginx instead of Apache, this dashboard will help them track connections and request rates.
16. System Overview
Ever felt that you did not have a good grasp of your app’s performance? Whether you want to track CPU usage or inbound traffic, this dashboard is for you.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard allows you to visualize data related to your app’s or system’s performance, including:
- CPU usage gauge
- Memory usage gauge
- Disk usage
- Inbound and outbound traffic
- Top hosts by CPU and memory
- Memory usage vs. total memory
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- This dashboard has several views: System overview, Host overview, and Containers overview. All three of them allow you to visualize all the data you need to know in one place to track your system’s performance.
Bonus: Security Dashboard
This cybersecurity dashboard helps you keep track of the security of your application. You can see alerts, problems with user authentications, and more.
This dashboard works with Elastic’s security feature. Elastic Security, as it is called, is built on the Elastic Stack.
Elastic Security helps analysts detect threats before they become a reality. It also helps them respond to threats that appear.
Anti-malware detection is included.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard helps you understand the security profile of your application. You can keep track of failed user authentication attempts – a spike in which, for example, might indicate an attack – and other security problems.
It works with Elastic Security. If you are using Elastic Security to protect your application, use this dashboard to allow your security teams to quickly notice and respond to threats.
Your security team can even pull data from nontraditional sources, such as business analytics, to get an even deeper insight into possible security threats.
Here is some of the data you can visualize with this dashboard:
- External alerts trends
- Events
- User authentications: Successes vs. fails
- Unique IP count
- Uncommon processes and anomalies
- Network map
People’s Response To This Dashboard
- This dashboard is essential for security teams using Elastic Security.
Why Use Kibana?
Kibana is extremely flexible. You can populate your dashboard with data and alerts from various sources.
You can add data sources as necessary and you can also pick between different data displays. For example, you can add gauges, histograms, pie charts, and bar graphs.
Each display type allows you to visualize important data in different ways, zooming in on certain aspects of the data and what they mean to you.
How To Create The Perfect Kibana Dashboard
In order to create the perfect Kibana dashboard, it is important to understand the different types of charts and graphs you can add to your dashboard. These charts and graphs will help you visualize data in different ways.
You might visualize data with both a gauge and a pie chart, for example, to help you view the total count and the percentage of different aspects that make up the total count.
At Coralogix, you can read more about the different types of Kibana charts and graphs you can add to your dashboard. Here are the main ones to know:
- Area: This helps you view data with timestamps. For example, you might use it for errors over time.
- Line chart: This is also for time series data. You might use it for CPU usage over time, to see when CPU usage spiked.
- Pie chart: This will help you see which aspects make up what percentage of a total. For example, how much traffic is coming from social media vs. organic SEO.
- Heat maps: Heat maps use color to show the magnitude of different data points.
- Geographical maps: These help you see data points based on geographical location. For example, you might want to see where people are logging in from.
- Gauge: The gauge shows you your current count as shown in a gauge, resembling the speedometer on a car.
- Goal gauge: This is similar to the above. However, it allows you to compare your current count vs. your final goal.
There are more types of visualizations you can add. However, it’s not about making your dashboard look cool.
Instead, it is about displaying the data YOU need to know to run your application effectively. What data do you want to track, and what will be the easiest way to visualize and track it?
Once you know what your goals are and the data you will need to track to reach your goals and improve your performance, you can create the perfect Kibana dashboard.
Wrapping It Up
These dashboards are just example dashboards. They are meant to give you an idea of what is possible with Kibana.
At the end of the day, it is up to you to create a dashboard that works for you and helps you reach your goals.
Tom loves to write on technology, e-commerce & internet marketing. I started my first e-commerce company in college, designing and selling t-shirts for my campus bar crawl using print-on-demand. Having successfully established multiple 6 & 7-figure e-commerce businesses (in women’s fashion and hiking gear), I think I can share a tip or 2 to help you succeed.