Display text in kibana pretty

[cf4455]

Hi,

i use the elastic together with kibana. Success and error messages are saved in the logs into the elastic. So there is an attribute errorState, which can be true or false. In addition, there is an errorMessage attribute, which contains a text in the event of an error.

The user can view the logs in Kibana via a dashboard and can filter for errors, for example. How to display text in Kibana pretty? Visualizations like tables and tag clouds are not very pretty for long text. Which visualization is best for this? It could be that only a single error is displayed, then only one error must be displayed. But what if it shows 3 or 20 errors and their messages?

Kind Regards
Christian

[cheiligers]

@cf4455 If I understand your request correctly, I believe what you want to know is how to have an error message log entry displayed as formatted json ("pretty"). In the latest version of the stack, Kibana Discover has some really great customization options that help with visualizing unstructured data (your errorMessage attribute in each error log document).

Discover searches are saved as Search saved objects (visualizations) that can be added to a Dashboard.

Discover also has an easy way to visualize whatever field you're interested in as visualizations, so you might want to explore these too.

[cf4455]

Hello @cheiligers, no, unfortunately you didn't understand me correctly. I may have expressed myself wrong. At the moment I am displaying the errorMessages in a table, see screenshot. The text of the errorMessage is on the left, the number on the right. Of course, this is not nice for longer texts. Is there a better visualization for longer texts?

[cheiligers]

@cf4455 which Kibana application did you use to create the table? As far as I'm aware, there are three applications that provide table visualizations: Lens, TSVB, and Discover.
It would also help the Kibana visualizations team if we knew what version of the stack you're using. I have reached out to the visualizations team and hope to hear from them shortly.

[flash1293 (Joe Reuter)]

IMHO tables are the best way to display long texts. In more recent versions you can configure auto-row height, so long values are not truncated but span multiple rows:

You can also change the width of the columns by dragging the border between them to get less whitespace for the low digit metrics.

[cf4455]

Hi @cheiligers and @flash1293 I am using kibana version 7.11.2 and the visualisation "Aggreagation based". I will try the example in the screenshot. With multiple rows it looks better as the truncated strings.

[cf4455]

Hi @flash1293, I'm now using a table with Lens, that helps me! Thank you!