Kibana

Data visualization plugin for Elasticsearch

Kibana

Developer(s)| Elastic NV
Stable release|

9.0.4 / 22 July 2025; 6 days ago (2025-07-22)[1]

Repository|

* github.com/elastic/kibana

Written in| TypeScript, JavaScript
Operating system| Cross-platform
License| Triple-licensed Elastic License 2.0[2] (proprietary; source-available), Server Side Public License (proprietary; source-available) and Affero General Public License (free and open-source)
Website| www.elastic.co/products/kibana

Kibana is a source-available[3] data visualization dashboard software for Elasticsearch.

## History

[edit]

Kibana provides visualization capabilities on top of the content indexed on an Elasticsearch cluster. Users can create bar, line and scatter plots, or pie charts and maps on top of large volumes of data.[4]

Kibana also provides a presentation tool, referred to as Canvas, that allows users to create slide decks that pull live data directly from Elasticsearch.[5]

The combination of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, referred to as the "Elastic Stack" (formerly the "ELK stack"), is available as a product or service.[6] Logstash provides an input stream to Elasticsearch for storage and search, and Kibana accesses the data for visualizations such as dashboards.[7] Elastic also provides "Beats" packages which can be configured to provide pre-made Kibana visualizations and dashboards about various database and application technologies.[8]

In December 2019, Elastic introduced Kibana Lens product, which is a simpler drag-and-drop user interface than the original aggregation based visualizations.[9]

In May 2021, OpenSearch released the first beta of OpenSearch Dashboards, the Apache-licensed fork of Kibana sponsored by Amazon Web Services after Elastic discontinued the open source project and switched to proprietary software development.[10]

In August 2024 the GNU Affero General Public License was added as an option, making Kibana free and open-source once again.[11]

## See also

[edit]

* OpenSearch (software), an open source fork of Kibana

## References

[edit]

1. ^ "Releases - elastic/kibana". github.com. Archived from the original on 2018-04-25. Retrieved 2025-07-22.
2. ^ "kibana/LICENSE.txt at master". github.com. Archived from the original on 2021-10-30. Retrieved 2021-04-13.
3. ^ FAQ. "FAQ on 2021 License Change". www.elastic.co. Archived from the original on 2022-10-31. Retrieved 2022-05-10.
4. ^ "Five reasons to upgrade to Kibana 4". theserverside.com. Archived from the original on 12 March 2016. Retrieved 30 December 2015.
5. ^ Groves, Ethan (2018-10-11). "Getting Started with Canvas in Kibana". elastic.co. Archived from the original on 2020-10-01. Retrieved 15 March 2019.
6. ^ Kepes, Ben (2015-07-01). "Elastic Rolls Out Elasticsearch-As-A-Service". Forbes. Archived from the original on 2016-12-23. Retrieved 22 December 2016.
7. ^ Gupta, Yuvraj (30 October 2015). Kibana Essentials. ISBN 978-1-784-39493-6.
8. ^ "Getting started with Beats". elastic.co. Archived from the original on 21 December 2018. Retrieved 20 December 2018.
9. ^ Nadler, Alona (December 2, 2019). "Introducing Kibana Lens: An easy, intuitive way to explore data". Elastic Blog. Archived from the original on January 17, 2020. Retrieved January 18, 2020.
10. ^ Meadows, Carl (April 12, 2021). "Introducing OpenSearch". Amazon Web Services. Archived from the original on 2021-11-07. Retrieved 2021-04-12.
11. ^ Banon, Shay (2024-08-29). "Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again".

## External links

[edit]

* Official website
* kibana on GitHub