Preface

Today, understanding data, whatever the nature of the data is, keeps getting harder. They are couple of reasons for that such as the volume, the variety of data, the pace at which the data is created and the complexity to correlate data from different sources.

It’s hard for anyone to cope with this constant increasing challenge, that’s why more and more applications are built to facilitate data management, at every level: ingesting data, processing data, storing data, and ultimately visualizing the data to understand it.

All those levels put together are the fundamental layers to build a data-driven architecture that needs to scale with a growing demand and expectation from users.

There is tons of software and applications out there that could answer those challenges, but rarely will you find a stack that could fulfill all the requirements altogether and across many types of use cases.

The Elastic Stack is one of them: it gives the user a way to access their data in an agile and scalable way. Kibana is part of the Elastic Stack and provide a visualization layer on top of data indexed in Elasticsearch, the storage layer.

In Learning Kibana 5.0, we’ll go through the holistic visualization experience that Kibana offers to address very different use cases, such as creating dashboards using accidents data, or building statistics on top system data, or even detecting anomalies in data.

Rather than listing and going through Kibana features one by one, this book adopts a pragmatic approach where you will learn based on concrete examples and hands-on.