How to create a menu for my dashboards?

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

I want to build a dashboard that displays data on server health. Say, RAM/CPU/Network/etc data from CollectD. That's obviously a dashboard that is useful on all my servers, so I want to be able to switch between data for individual servers quickly.

Effectively, a list of filters for the host.raw field that I can turn on and off. Depending on the data being viewed, I'd want to be able to turn on more than one filter at a time. (Like Apache data from multiple load balanced nodes.)

I tried creating a "Top 1000 host.raw" data table visualization. But once I click on a row, that visualization only lists the host I clicked on. I have to hit the back button, or otherwise clear the filter, to change what host I'm looking at. Which means I can only filter on one host, not more that one. That's fine for health data, but kinda defeats the whole point of Kibana's ability to aggregate from lots of hosts...

I can, I think, just modify the search bar to search on the hosts I want. But that's not exactly quick, and relies on me typing the hostnames without typos...

As I think about this, what I really want is the ability to create a UI menu that lets me apply filters and/or searches to the current dashboard. It would be a dynamic menu that builds menu items based on data from a field. To make it even more awesome, I'd want to be able to manually add menu items that apply custom filters or searches.

Is there any way to build something like that?

2

Not in a nice way for the minute.

You could have a markdown box that has a link to different dashboards though?

3

A markdown box could definitely work as part of a work around. Thanks for the idea.

Does Kibana 4 have a plugin api or something I could use to insert my own code without hacking core Kibana 4?

4

It does, that was a core reason for the rewrite from 3>4.

However it's entirely DIY at this stage as there are no docs around it (yet). There is a great talk from Elastic{on} from Spencer Alger that goes into this though, so might be worth starting there.

5

Could you tell us what talk is it please?

6

You can find a recording here: https://www.elastic.co/elasticon/2015/sf/contributors-guide-to-the-kibana-galaxy

Note, however, that Kibana is a fast-moving project and a lot of things change on the code side, if you look at latest versions or master.

7

Thank you Tanya!

8

So, I found this: http://demo.elastic.co/packetbeat

That's an excellent demonstration of @warkolm's markdown box idea. :slight_smile: At least I assume the Navigation visualization is a markdown box.

1 Like
9

It is!