Elastic introduces a simple and flexible way to build data
visualizations in Kibana
Elastic N.V. (NYSE: ESTC) (“Elastic”), the company behind
Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, is excited to announce the
arrival of Kibana Lens, a significant step forward in making data
visualization and exploration with the Elastic Stack even easier
and more intuitive.
This press release features multimedia. View
the full release here:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191202005794/en/
With Lens, users can build a
visualization simply by dragging and dropping a data field into a
window, and the smart suggestions built into the platform provide
new ways of visualizing data — all while giving users the
flexibility to change their mind and quickly switch between chart
types and index patterns. (Graphic: Business Wire)
Millions of people already use Kibana to visualize and interact
with data in real time. With the initial beta launch of Kibana
Lens, Elastic is introducing an easy and intuitive way to rapidly
gain insight into Elasticsearch data. Lens is focused on ease of
use, visualization best practices, and flexibility. Users can build
a visualization simply by dragging and dropping a data field into a
window, and the smart suggestions built into Lens provide new ways
of visualizing data — all while giving users the flexibility to
change their mind and quickly switch between chart types and index
patterns. With Lens, slicing and dicing through data in Kibana has
never been simpler or more fun.
Kibana Lens is available for free to Elastic users as a part of
the default distribution. Lens is being introduced as a beta in the
7.5 release of the Elastic Stack and is available immediately on
the Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud, or for download.
A colorful visual journey
Kibana was originally built by engineers for engineers, getting
its start as a UI for Elasticsearch developers. Soon, developers
began using Kibana instead of the command line as a convenient way
to view and search Elasticsearch data. Not long after that, Elastic
added visualizations and charts to Kibana, allowing users to
aggregate and display data visually. Kibana quickly became popular
with Elastic customers like Netflix, Uber, and Walmart for data
visualization and exploration. Over the years, Elastic has been
inspired by the community to come up with more and more
capabilities around data visualizations, focusing on the
fundamental challenge of visualizing large amounts of data at
scale.
As people started adopting Elasticsearch and Kibana for more and
more use cases, Kibana has been introduced to new types of users,
including engineers, developers, analysts, executives, and data
scientists, many of whom are using Kibana on a daily basis. This is
Elastic’s next area of focus — making Kibana easier to use for a
broader audience.
Around two years ago, Elastic started looking into how to help
more users explore their data. The company realized they needed to
apply the years of knowledge they had gained working on data
visualizations and talking to users to build something new and do
it right. This project needed to allow the company to move faster,
support more chart types, and combine data from multiple index
patterns in a single visualization, all while providing an elevated
user experience.
While building this completely new infrastructure, Elastic spent
a year exploring many of the data visualization challenges that
users face, as well as the solutions that are out there. Elastic
interviewed dozens of companies that are using Kibana and other
tools for a wide range of scenarios to identify the ways these
companies are using their data and the challenges they are
facing.
Kibana Lens is the next step on this journey: a completely new
user experience that is simple and intuitive while still allowing
users to perform powerful analyses on huge data volumes in real
time.
Welcome, Kibana Lens
Lens makes it easy for Kibana users to start exploring their
data while switching between multiple charts and functions for
analysis across multiple dimensions. Lens removes the need to
understand complex Elasticsearch terminology in favor of a
simplified user interface that everyone can use. Any Kibana user
can start gaining insights from their data by simply dragging and
dropping fields and seeing a preview of their visualization, then
leveraging smart suggestions from Lens to explore other possible
visualizations and pick the right one.
Based on years of watching people explore data within the
Elastic Stack, Elastic built Lens around four simple yet powerful
concepts.
Data driven
To create a visualization, a user needs to decide which fields
from their data to include. During user testing, Elastic observed
users moving back and forth between different screens to locate the
right field to answer their questions. This is often not a trivial
task, since the users who are analyzing the data are not
necessarily the same users who created the field names, indices,
and mappings. In Lens, by selecting a field, users can immediately
take advantage of the speed of Elasticsearch and get a preview of
the field content for quick context. Looking at the field's value
will help the user understand whether this is the field needed to
answer their question.
Immediate preview
Data visualizations help people understand their data. It sounds
simple, but data visualization is often complex, especially when
trying to create meaningful visualizations from huge datasets that
look at the data in a summarized way.
In Lens, the goal is to make creating visualizations easier for
users, as well as to provide surface guidance on best approaches.
To support easy creation, dragging a data field into the central
window will generate an immediate preview of a chart. No need to
configure, no need to choose which aggregation or function; simply
drag the field over and see how Lens visualizes the data.
Smart suggestions
Elastic also noticed some common patterns in the way users
visualize their data, as well as confusion over how to visualize
data effectively. This is an important problem, because often the
chart used to display data informs the insights someone can get out
of it. In building Lens, Elastic wanted to combine common user
patterns with data visualization best practices. Starting from the
first preview, Lens provides smart suggestions with alternative
ways to visualize the data based on the field selected by the user.
These suggestions are based on multiple factors, including the
field type, chart type, and other common paths people are using
along with a ranking algorithm that sorts them based on their
relevance likelihood. The smart suggestions often help users to
answer follow-up questions that come to mind after viewing a chart
or provide slightly different angles than the visualization
currently displayed. Each suggestion also has a description
allowing users to quickly understand how it is different than the
visualization they are currently looking at. Smart suggestions are
the first step in providing recommendations that are personalized
to users’ data.
Ad-hoc and reusable
Occasionally users know exactly what type of visualization they
need, but more often they have a question in mind that requires
data to answer it, and they just start exploring. To answer ad-hoc
queries you need the ability to change your mind — the ability to
switch between chart types, change the underlying data of a chart
to another data source, or even combine multiple index patterns in
a single visualization. Lens makes it possible to explore data in a
more freeform way. Best of all, users can save what works and reuse
it later as part of a dashboard.
The journey continues
Elastic continues to introduce new functionality and address new
use cases faster than ever. Kibana Lens is another great step
toward allowing people to get meaningful insights out of their data
using powerful capabilities via a simple experience.
Harel Insurance Investments and Financial Services Ltd. is
currently using Kibana to visualize and explore operations,
security, business, and marketing data, and they’ve expressed
excitement at the new possibilities introduced by Kibana Lens.
“Harel is deeply dedicated to its customers which means ensuring
their experience is positive when they interact with our digital
services. Elastic’s solutions help us achieve that goal, not only
by providing a centralized place to store and analyze critical
process data, but also through products like Kibana that let Harel
business analysts search and visualize data for key insights,” said
Harel CTO Niv Raz. “With the launch of Lens, we’re excited to put
the power of simple drag-and-drop analysis, immediate data
previews, and automatic visualization best practices into the hands
of our people so they can use data faster in support of customer
needs.”
Lens is a major milestone in the Elastic journey, and Elastic is
excited to continue building and taking it forward. Capabilities
like supporting more charts, adding even smarter suggestions,
supporting more functions, and allowing for more customizations are
at the top of Elastic’s roadmap. Elastic plans to iterate fast all
while continuing to push the boundaries of the data visualization
world to deliver a simple and powerful solution.
Get started with Lens today
To get started, spin up a cluster on Elasticsearch Service or
install the latest version of the Elastic Stack. Already have
Kibana running? Just upgrade your clusters to 7.5 and give Lens a
try.
You can find Lens within the Visualize app inside of Kibana.
After you’ve created and saved a visualization using Lens, it can
be added to a dashboard just like any other visualization.
Learn More
- Lens overview video
- Lens documentation
- Register for an upcoming Lens webinar
About Elastic
Elastic is a search company. As the creators of the Elastic
Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash), Elastic builds
self-managed and SaaS offerings that make data usable in real time
and at scale for use cases like application search, site search,
enterprise search, logging, APM, metrics, security, business
analytics, and many more.
Elastic and associated marks are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Elastic N.V. and its subsidiaries. All other company
and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191202005794/en/
Elastic Dan Reidy press@elastic.co
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