• Elasticsearch
  • Technical
Managed Kibana Now Available With Instaclustr Managed Elasticsearch™

Instaclustr is pleased to announce the availability of Managed Kibana, which can be deployed with an Instaclustr Managed Elasticsearch cluster.

Kibana’s Features

Kibana is an open source data exploration and visualization tool which allows you to analyze massive amounts of data residing in an Elasticsearch cluster. Kibana offers its powerful features through a browser-based interface that lets you search, visualize, and analyze your data in Elasticsearch. With Kibana you can create flexible and custom dashboards using a wide range of charts and graphs. 

Beyond visualization and analysis, Kibana also provides a user interface to configure some of the Open Distro for Elasticsearch plugins like Security and Alerting. It also offers application developers useful tools to interact with Elasticsearch, investigate and debug issues, optimize search performance, and tune indexing parameters. As a feature-rich tool with versatile functions, it is useful for developers, operations teams, search architects, data engineers, and scientists alike.

At Instaclustr, Kibana plays a key role in assisting our Technical Operations team to monitor business critical clusters running in production environments. Our Senior Technical Operations member, Arran Dengate, says:

We love Kibana’s visualization capability—when investigating an error, ‘Discover’ shows the distribution over time. For example, it can show whether batch size warnings have been occurring more frequently, lately (indicating increasing batch size during indexing), or show whether an error has been seen before (if not, perhaps it was introduced by a recent code change). It’s like having ad hoc metric collections that are not covered by our normal metrics.”

Instaclustr Managed Kibana

These powerful capabilities made Managed Kibana the first enhancement on our roadmap for our Managed Elasticsearch offering.

Key Points:

  • Customers need to opt in for this feature as part of provisioning an Elasticsearch cluster on the Instaclustr Managed Platform.
  • When opted-in, a dedicated node is provisioned with Kibana pre-installed along with Elasticsearch (operating as a coordinator node with no search data). You may select an appropriate node size from the same set of instance types available for Elasticsearch nodes.
  • Kibana is currently not covered under any SLAs. Kibana in a high availability configuration, with an appropriate SLA, is slated for a future release.
  • Kibana is available on AWS, GCP, and Azure clouds, with an option to run it either in Instaclustr’s cloud account (RIIA) or in your own cloud account (RIYOA).
  • All core features of Kibana, and an interface to manage the security plugin, are available. Support for alerting and other plugins will be added in the near future.
  • Our Elasticsearch service with Kibana, and its security plugin, are SOC 2 compliant.
  • Kibana and the Open Distro for Elasticsearch are 100% open source projects available entirely under the Apache 2.0 license.
  • If you have an existing production Elasticsearch cluster on the Instaclustr platform, please raise a support ticket to get Kibana added to it. For non-production deployments, a quicker alternative is to delete the cluster and provision a new cluster.

Finally, we bring to Elasticsearch and Kibana the customer focus that is embedded in all Instaclustr’s open source products. This includes 24×7 support from our technical operations team, an attentive Customer Success team, and access to our world class experts for advice or training.

If you want Elasticsearch as a truly managed service, with responsive and attentive support, and built-in Kibana, simply create an account on the Instaclustr Managed Console here, create an Elasticsearch cluster, and experiment with it using pre-installed Kibana. Contact the Instaclustr Sales or Customer Success team if you have any specific questions about any of our offerings or the upcoming features in the product roadmap.

More details on how to deploy and use Kibana with the Instaclustr Managed Elasticsearch offering is documented on our support website.