﻿---
title: Building dashboards
description: Kibana offers many ways to build powerful dashboards that will help you visualize and keep track of the most important information contained in your Elasticsearch...
url: https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/4251/explore-analyze/dashboards/building
products:
  - Kibana
---

# Building dashboards
Kibana offers many ways to build powerful dashboards that will help you visualize and keep track of the most important information contained in your Elasticsearch data.
- Create and assemble visualizations such as charts or maps, and enrich them with helpful legends containing key data.
- Extract and show key indicators and metrics to keep them visible and highlighted at all times.
- Add text, images, and links to help viewers make the most of your dashboard.
- Include additional controls to facilitate filtering and browsing the data.


To create or edit dashboards, you first need to:
- have [data indexed into Elasticsearch](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/4251/manage-data/ingest) and a [data view](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/4251/explore-analyze/find-and-organize/data-views). A data view is a subset of your Elasticsearch data, and allows you to load the right data when building a visualization or exploring it.
  <tip>
  If you don’t have data at hand and still want to explore dashboards, you can import one of the [sample data sets](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/4251/manage-data/ingest/sample-data) available.
  </tip>
- have sufficient permissions on the **Dashboard** feature. If that’s not the case, you might get a read-only indicator. A Kibana administrator can [grant you the required privileges](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/4251/deploy-manage/users-roles/cluster-or-deployment-auth/kibana-privileges).