How to import Sample kibana 6.3 dashboards

[Anil_Bind]

Hi,
I am a newbie in elk, just practicing it on my home network.
I have an ELK 6.3 server setup with NGINX (for authentication)
configured two nodes, one is centos 7 which has metricbeat and filebeat; and other one is Windows Server 2012 R2 which has filebeat, metricbeat, winlogbeat and heartbeat.
All beats are also of 6.3 version, and most important the beats are SENDING DATA TO LOGSTASH.
Having trouble to import sample kibana dashboards from the beats.
Also not clear with the whole picture, can anyone help?

[Marius_Dragomir]

Hello,

This is pretty much all you need to follow to import the dashboards, One beat will import them for all:
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/metricbeat/current/load-kibana-dashboards.html
If you get stuck anywhere, just let us know and we can help from there.

[Anil_Bind]

Hi Marius,

Thanks for the reply

During dashboard loading, Metricbeat connects to Elasticsearch to check version information. To load dashboards when the Logstash output is enabled, I need to temporarily disable the Logstash output and enable Elasticsearch.
But can I disable beat to check version information of elasticsearch, I mean is it necessary. Because to enable elasticsearch I have to reconfigure NGINX to allow elasticsearch instead of Kibana.

If I'll try this it trows error because of NGINX
PS > .\metricbeat.exe setup -e -E output.logstash.enabled=false
-E output.elasticsearch.hosts=['172.16.2.251:9200'] `
-E setup.kibana.host=172.16.2.251:5601

any workaround?

[Anil_Bind]

Is there any manual way to copy the dashboards of beats in windows folder into linux elk server

[Marius_Dragomir]

You could try using this method:
./metricbeat setup -E setup.kibana.host=hostname:5601 -E setup.kibana.username=elastic -E setup.kibana.password=secret
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/devguide/master/import-dashboards.html
This way you only need to run this once, without changing your logstash output.

[Anil_Bind]

In PS it states "Exiting: Template loading requested but the Elasticsearch output is not configured/enabled"

I reckon it's still asking elasticsearch for the version.

[Anil_Bind]

I came across this "setup.dashboards.always_kibana" which forces loading of dashboards using the Kibana API without querying Elasticsearch for the version, but does it works for 6.3 version, caz it's not working for me.