Visualize website usage by users

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

Goal: I want to create a dashboard which shows user requests made to my website. For this, I created a filter in my java web-app and started capturing user requests and storing them in an ES index. The document is in the form of:
{
'user': 'user1',
'url': 'domain.com/page1',
'hitcount': 12
}
So, now I have an index which contains the information as to how many times a user requested which URLs.
Now, I want to create visualizations to show usage trends per user.

Question:

  1. Which visualizations should be used for this use-case?
  2. If I need to show the change in user-trends over time, how should I save the data? For e.g. is there a visualization where I could show, that a user has stopped/reduced requesting a page and now accesses a different page more frequently.

Any direction will be helpful.
Note: I understand, this could be done with grafana + prometheus, but I wish to do this with elastic stack.

2

hi @BlueSpirit,

that should be fairly easy to do in Kibana.

for (1): you can use the date-histogram to show these trends over timte (bar chart, line chart, ...). You would split by terms as a sub-aggregation, where a term is the user-field. For the metric, select sum of all hitCounts.

for (2): nest another term sub-aggregation for the url field, which will group your data for each user for each url. Then, when you filter down to a specific user (e.g. by filtering on the user-field for a specific value, you can track the behavior of the user for all pages over time.

3

Hi @thomasneirynck,
Thanks for the reply. Currently, I have bar and pie charts. where splitting criteria is done on user and url. Also, I created tag-cloud charts to show top-5 URLs and top-5 users.

Also, should I change the way we store this data. As in, should I save each request individually and then create charts on aggregated data. Only concern is the space it will take.

4

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