Kibana fit for purpose

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

Hey all,

I am looking to be sure that Kibana is fit for purpose for us. We use Power BI to pull some data out of a number of XLS spreadsheets. I know Logstash can't deal with XLS, so I will be scripting these to saved to CSV and then pushed into Logstash.

How the business works:
Currently the business has a number of spreadsheets that are updated daily with sales records, there are a number of fields but in essence there is a Sales Rep code that is applied to each order, along with the date, the month (separate column as this dictates which months figures the sale goes against, along with Total invoiced, Total purchased and Profit. (REP, Invoiced, Purchased, Profit). There are 3 spreadsheets, 1 for each department that are identical in layout (I have managed to get this change made) and there is a spreadsheet for each year.

I cant change how they work, I have tried.

What needs to be reported:
Right so with the above explained, I will be indexing the same spreadsheets each day (the 3 latest ones) so I am concerned that data will be duplicated. Or will Logstash deal with this itself?
From Kibana, the main requirement is to consolidate the data from these sheets into something as follows (This is from BI):

Summary
Summary.png931×351 11.2 KB

This is the most important for the business as it forms the basis of how the sales reps commission is paid. Flowing forward, I want to replicate what I have in BI, where Sales Reps themselves can search for orders as well as see how well they are doing, which customers are the most profitable, haven't placed orders in a while ect
Orders

Moving deeper into graphing year on year trends with the ability to filter on the fly by customer / sales rep ect.

Summary
So in summary, I guess I am asking is can Kibana / Logstash help achive this? I assume it can as what we are trying to do here isn't exactly far out there and is functionality that can be achieved in basic Excel. Ideally these will be displayed as Sales Dashboards on the wall so they can see their figures for the month.

I have mentioned BI a couple times, and in case someone asks, the reason we have to move away from Power BI is that Microsoft decided that in order for someone to just be able to view a report they need to have a Pro licence.

Thanks
Chris

2

Hi Chris

From looking at the description you provided it sounds like it is something that can be done using Kibana.
Im not logstash expert but sounds like in order to allow you the flexibility of both aggregated view by year and by rep I would recommend flattening the data, so in your case, every order line can be a separate document loaded into Elasticsearch and include the year and departments as a field in this document, that way, later on, you can aggregate by one or both of them.
So in general if you ingest the document in the right way you should be able to build all the visualizations you show above

3

Its looking like it may not be possible out the box. The first page has a Pivot table, which is the main aspect.

Unless there is an updated plugin to support Pivot tables I think I am out of luck

4

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.