Part 1 - Introduction to ElasticSearch & Kibana

Part 1: Introduction & Running Up ElasticSearch & Kibana (you are here…)

Part 2: Queries & Operations in ElasticSearch on various Indexes & Documents

Part 3: Comming Soon…

What is ElasticSearch

Elasticsearch is a search engine based on Lucene library. It is a distributed RESTful search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents.

Why ElasticSearch ?

• HTTP RESTful API’s
• Near real-time searches.
• Build on top of Apache Lucene (Hence very stable and good support in community)
• Distributed & Highly scalable tool (a boon for cloud servers).
• Unstructured Database, hence no upfront schema defination. (Although schema can be defined and is recommended for customization of indexing and many other processes).

Some basic Terminologies / Buzz words

• Node: A node is a single server which is a part of cluster. It stores the data, do Indexing & provide search capability on the indexed data.
• Index: An index is a collection of similar documents identified by a name. We can use CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operation on an Index.
• Document: A document is a unit or a single piece of information residing in an Index.

Installing ElasticSearch

Installing Elasticsearch is as easy as downloading a zip/tarball and extracting it on a particular location(folder).

• For windows/MacOS/Linux download elasticsearch from this page
• Ex. Since I am on Linux, so I have downloaded LINUX X86_64 version
• Unzip or uncompress it to any folder
• cd into the folder and run ./bin/elasticsearch (for linux) or bin\elasticsearch.bat (for windows)

After running you will be getting an output like this

That means elasticsearch is starting. And soon after that you can go to http://localhost:9200/ to verify whether it is started or not.

Kibana

We will use Kibana to interact with elasticsearch.

• Kibana is an open source data visualization dashboard for Elasticsearch
• It can visualize contents indexed on top of elasticsearch
• Users can create visualizations in the form of bar, line, scatter plots or pie charts, histograms etc.
• Kibana also provides an amazing editor for testing out the RESTful API’s to perform CRUD operations on Elasticsearch

Installing Kibana

The process is same

1. Go to the downloads page
2. Download the zip/tarball according to your platform and uncompress it.
3. cd into the folder and run ./bin/kibana (for linux) or bin\kibana.bat (for windows)

After running the command you will get an output like this.

Now go to http://localhost:5601/ to see Kibana dashboard

Now you can click on Dev Tools in the top right corner (or from the hamburger icon in the top-left corner). You will be greeted to this screen. This is the place where we can execute & debug our RESTful queries.

Please see the Part 2 of this Editorial for more Information about using this Dev Tool & various structures, operations & queries in ElasticSearch.

Congratulations on successfully installing and running ElasticSearch & Kibana & Thanks for sticking till the end.

Please let me know about your views or queries in the comment section.