Step 5: Loading Sample Kibana Dashboards

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Step 5: Loading Sample Kibana Dashboards

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To make it easier for you to start monitoring your servers in Kibana, we have created sample Metricbeat dashboards. The dashboards are provided as examples. We recommend that you customize them to meet your needs.

Metricbeat Dashboard

Importing the Dashboards

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Metricbeat comes packaged with the scripts/import_dashboards script that you can use to import the example dashboards, visualizations, and searches for Metricbeat. The script also creates an index pattern, metricbeat-*, for Metricbeat.

The steps in this section show how to import Metricbeat dashboards. You may want to import dashboards for more than one Beat or specify import options that aren’t described here. See Importing Existing Beat Dashboards in the Beats Platform Reference for a full list of command-line options.

To import the Kibana dashboards for Metricbeat:

deb, rpm, and mac:

From the directory where you installed Metricbeat, run the import_dashboards script.

./scripts/import_dashboards

docker:

docker run docker.elastic.co/beats/metricbeat:5.5.3 ./scripts/import_dashboards

On deb, rpm, and docker, the scripts folder is located under the home path, which is /usr/share/metricbeat/ unless you change it.

By default, the script assumes that you are running Elasticsearch on 127.0.0.1:9200. Use the -es option to specify a different location. For example:

./scripts/import_dashboards -es http://192.168.33.60:9200

Use the -user option to specify the username and password to use for Elasticsearch authentication. There are a few ways to pass in the username and password. For example:

./scripts/import_dashboards -es https://xyz.found.io -user user -pass password 
./scripts/import_dashboards -es https://xyz.found.io -user admin -pass $(cat ~/pass-file) 

Specify the username and password as options.

Use a file to avoid polluting the bash history with the password.

win:

Open a PowerShell prompt as an Administrator (right-click the PowerShell icon and select Run As Administrator). If you are running Windows XP, you may need to download and install PowerShell.

From the PowerShell prompt, change to the directory where you installed Metricbeat, and run the import_dashboards.exe script:

PS > scripts\import_dashboards.exe

By default, the script assumes that you are running Elasticsearch on 127.0.0.1:9200. Use the -es option to specify a different location. For example:

PS > scripts\import_dashboards.exe -es http://192.168.33.60:9200

If script execution is disabled on your system, you need to set the execution policy for the current session to allow the script to run. For example: PowerShell.exe -ExecutionPolicy UnRestricted -File scripts\import_dashboards.exe -es http://192.168.33.60:9200.

Use the -user option to specify the username and password to use for Elasticsearch authentication:

PS > scripts\import_dashboards.exe -es https://xyz.found.io -user user -pass password

Opening the Dashboards in Kibana

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After importing the dashboards, launch the Kibana web interface by pointing your browser to port 5601. For example, http://127.0.0.1:5601.

On the Discover page, make sure that the predefined metricbeat-* index pattern is selected to see Metricbeat data.

Discover tab with index selected

To open the loaded dashboards, go to the Dashboard page and select the dashboard that you want to open.

Navigation widget in Kibana