For this year's advent calendar, I thought I will try to ingest some music data into elasticsearch and talk about few of my favourite features in Discover and Dashboard for analytics in Kibana 8.11 (our latest release) for novice users.
I have never been a big metal fan. So obviously 
, I found a .csv data set of metal music which had band name(wow, some very..errr..interesting names), origin year, origin country, number of registered fans in the band's website and the style. Once I did, I used the data visualizer to ingest it into elasticsearch. It's a really easy way to ingest some data if you want to explore Kibana for analytics. Kibana's ML does some pretty nifty work analyzing the data so you can easily understand the shape of the data as shown in the screenshot below.
Once this was ingested, I clicked on discover to go and explore the data and figure out what kind of questions, I might want to ask of dataset. This is my view when I head into Discover. You can see that I ingested 4998 documents for metal data and the side bar displays the fields in my data set. I have band name, Origin country, Origin year, no of Registered fans, and their metal style.
Our discover team made it possible for us to drag and drop fields into this document view, so we can look at our data in tabular format. There is a lot of things you can do on the table now - like move the columns left or right, rename, download, sort and size the table.(Discover | Kibana Guide [8.11] | Elastic)
You can also switch to field statistics tab and look at the distribution of data and explore the data in visualize.
Now 
our ES|QL made its tech preview in 8.11.0. Its very accessible for beginners. You can see here that I have queried for total no of registered fans and got 26,582 as the answer (There is a lot more metal fans worldwide and this points out to the inaccuracies in my dataset and also problems with data collection, massaging etc 
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Now, you can edit this metric visualization directly in discover and add to a dashboard instead of navigating to dashboard and then doing it. Makes the workflow really smooth.
Talking about dashboards and work flow, here is one of my most favourite feature.
You can link your dashboards by using link panel, which makes for navigating between different dashboards easy and intuitive.
You can see that add panel got updated with a bunch of new panel types which makes it easy for users to use other capabilities of our stack like SLO, ML, etc
Finally, controls which let you filter and explore on your selected data.
Hope you enjoyed this short ride through some amazing new features in our stack. Now, did I become more comfortable with metal music? Well, I have always loved "Nothing else matters" by Metallica and safe to say, that's the extent of my metal love with some ac/dc thrown in.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays 