Building dashboards
Kibana offers many ways to build powerful dashboards that help you visualize and keep track of the most important information in your Elasticsearch data. Combine multiple visualizations, metrics, and interactive elements into a cohesive view that tells your data story and enables rapid decision-making.
Use the following table to find the right approach for building your dashboards, then follow the link to get started.
| Approach | When to use this | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Create a dashboard from the UI | Exploring data interactively and assembling dashboards panel by panel | Saved dashboard |
| Create dashboards programmatically | Automating deployments, managing dashboards and visualizations as code, CI/CD pipelines | Saved dashboard or visualization |
| Create dashboards using AI | Generating dashboards from natural language, or building AI tools that create dashboards | Dashboard through chat that you save when ready, or saved dashboard using the API |
Once you have a dashboard, you can also:
- Add filter controls to let viewers explore the data interactively
- Add drilldowns to navigate between dashboards or to external URLs
- Arrange and resize panels to get the layout you want
- Duplicate a dashboard as a starting point for a new one
- Import a dashboard exported from another Kibana instance
To create or edit dashboards, you need:
Data indexed into Elasticsearch and a data view. 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.
TipIf you don't have data at hand and still want to explore dashboards, you can import one of the sample data sets available.
Sufficient privileges for the Dashboard feature. Without them, you might get a read-only indicator. A Kibana administrator can grant you the required privileges.