Kibana - First steps

Firt things first: who is who ?

Tracking, follow-up, reports

All the chart visualizations which can be built up with Kibana and intergrated to the most advanced dashboards, serve solely one purpose: data digestion for tracking progress, making now possible to follow edge-cases of a handful of documents lost in a week-long non-stopping flood, and build reports out of it.

Kibana with Fast2

Now that things are getting clearer on the underlying motive of relying on Kibana, let’s dive right into the technical aspect regarding the combination of Fast2 and this third-party software.

Start-up sequence

When Fast2 is started, either as a standalone application or a service, its different modules share a precisely defined roll-out schedule:

• First, the broker and Elasticsearch are started. The connection between these 2 components has to be effective, otherwise Fast2 will automatically shut down after a couple of attempts to reach the database;
• The worker is then triggered, and has to register itself to the broker.
• Finally, Kibana will be started if asked so, and if the binaries have been detected. This is the moment where Fast2 will try to reach a separate instance of Kibana if one is already running on the machine.

There is no direct connection between the broker and Kibana. The only exchange area is the Elasticsearch database, as explained in the Architecture section.

Add-on vs official release

There are two ways to work with Kibana during a Fast2 migration:

1. Getting the Kibana add-on available with Fast2
2. Downloading online the compatible binaries of Kibana

In case you opt for the second option, a few adjustments need to be made in order to get the proper integration of Kibana to Fast2 (adjustments already tackled by the add-on).

• The Kibana binaries has to be the OSS (Open-Source Software) proposed by Elasticsearch, as ‘Past Releases’ assets;
• The version of Kibana must be compatible with the Elasticsearch module embedded in Fast2;
• Ports have to be updated in accordance with Fast2, both in Fast2 and Kibana configurations.

Kibana ports

By defaulf, Fast2 will expect Kibana on the port 1791. Changing this port will need to happen in 3 places :

Access to Kibana

Kibana visualizations can be reached via 2 different ways, depending on your needs:

• Either the main panel from the UI of a running Fast2,
• Or directly from the browser via the declared port (1791 or other).

The latter option gives access to the tool even when Fast2 is not running.

Although since Kibana fetches data directly from Elasticsearch, it is not possible to populate the visualizations with migration data if the database is not running as well.

How to disable Kibana

Kibana is definitely an add-on on top of Fast2, which means that starting Fast2 without Kibana will not get you into any trouble – by the bye, Fast2 is shipped without Kibana by default.

If a port has been configured for Kibana, Fast2 will ping this port to check if a running Kibana instance is already available. If not, our tool will scan the installation folder (where the broker and worker scripts are located) searching for any Kibana directory. The configuration property responsible for such behavior can be found in the config/application.properties file:

broker.kibana.embedded.enabled=true

If no Kibana start file is found, Fast2 will stop attempting to start Kibana after 200 retries (this value can be edited in the config/application.properties file under the name broker.kibana.embedded.maxRetries), but will still be usable.

Kibana assets

All new visualizations should be based on the f2_* index. For further analysis requiring narrower filters, the KQL query can be edited so the only results will match your scope of study.

To create an index pattern, head to Kibana then Management > Index Patterns and hit “Create index pattern”.

Enter the index pattern related to Fast2 data:

No time filter is required, select the right option and hit “Create index pattern”.

You can now build your own visualizations, or checkout the Official documentation of Kibana to get started.

Common error messages