The journey of your business into the future should start from where you are right now, but where is that precisely? In this comprehensive article, we will take a look at a service that will help organizations improve, its features, and its benefits. Meet Kibana as a service. But before anything else, why is reporting in the organization important?

The Importance Of Reporting In The Organization

The importance of business reporting starts from the first day and changes throughout the lifecycle of the business. You need to understand the available historical data of the company to enable you to budget, forecast, and plan for the future.

Reporting is incredibly essential so you can monitor the performance of your business over any period. It lets you make better decisions, project future results, and drive improvements.

Know that business reports are valuable and vital tools for any enterprise or organization regardless of size or industry. These reports provide a means to track and analyze the performance and overall health of the business while identifying areas for improvement and opportunities for growth.

Some business reporting may be necessary as part of a regulatory requirement. For instance, financial reports are a legal necessity for all businesses as determined by authorities in the country where the business is based. Regular business reporting and monitoring are likewise necessary for many organizations to keep senior management, board members, and other stakeholders advised on what is happening in the organization.

What is the purpose of business reporting? A business report aims to provide critical analysis of how the business is tracking in all areas of the organization. Business reports are crucial tools to guide decision-making and allow business owners and senior managers the opportunity to investigate and solve any identified issues.

Reporting is done via the process of compiling and reviewing the information within a specific functional area such as finance, sales, operations, inventory control, or any area of the business where performance is monitored and measured.

Once information is compiled and reviewed, conclusions can then be made, and recommendations are put forward. The report’s outcome may elaborate on why an issue has occurred or identify performance problems, and generally recommend a course of action.

But how do you do your business reporting well? This is where Kibana as a service does its work.

What Is Kibana As A Service?

Kibana is an open-source browser-based visualization tool mainly used to analyze large volumes of logs in line graphs, bar graphs, pie charts, heat maps, region maps, coordinate maps, gauges, goals, timeline, and a whole lot more. The visualization makes it easy to predict or visualize the changes in trends of error or other significant events of the input source. Kibana works in sync with Elasticsearch and Logstash, forming the ELK stack.

ELK stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. ELK is among the popular log management platforms utilized worldwide for log analysis. Logstash extracts the logging data or other events from various input sources in the ELK stack. It processes the events and later stores them in Elasticsearch.

Kibana is a visualization tool, as what has been mentioned earlier, accessing the logs from Elasticsearch and is also able to display to the user in the form of line graphs, bar graphs, pie charts, and more.

Logstash then takes charge of collecting the data from all remote sources where the logs are filed and pushes the same to Elasticsearch.

Elasticsearch acts as a database where the data is compiled, and Kibana uses the data from Elasticsearch to represent the data to the user in the form of bar graphs, pie charts, and heat maps, among many others.

It shows the data on a real-time basis, for instance, day-wise or hourly, to the user. Kibana user interface or UI is user-friendly and very easy for beginners to understand.

Why Use Kibana As A Service

In spite of the many incredible data visualization capabilities of Kibana, often, users find that their initial on-premise setup becomes time-consuming and costly to maintain when data inputs grow.

There are many platforms, therefore, that can provide this service. With the use of these comprehensive logging platforms, which includes Kibana as a service as standard, you will be able to eliminate the need to conduct extensive Elastic Stack training, upgrading, and maintaining your log management tool affordably.

Many of these platforms have robust-hosted Logstash pipelines where you can enrich your previously unstructured logs with additional fields for structured processing within Elasticsearch and Kibana.

However, make sure you steer away from logging platforms that use standard SSDs to power their infrastructure and only choose platforms that return results up to 10 times faster for queries made through Elasticsearch and Kibana with their NVMe-backed infrastructure. NVME has numerous successful use cases for real-time big data analysis.

Features Of Kibana As A Service

What are the features of Kibana as a service? Let us delve deep into these features.

1. Visualization

Kibana has a lot of ways to visualize data easily. Some of the commonly used ones are vertical bar charts, horizontal bar charts, pie charts, line graphs, and heat maps, among many others.

2. Dashboard

When the visualizations are ready, all of these can be placed on a single board, which is the dashboard. Observing various sections together gives the user a clear overall idea about what is happening.

3. Dev Tools

Users can also work with their indexes using dev tools. Beginners can add dummy indexes from dev tools and likewise add, update, delete the data, and use the indexes to create the visualization.

4. Reports

All the data in the form of visualization and dashboard can be converted to reports in CSV format, usually, embedded in the code or the form of URLs shareable with others.

5. Filters And Search Query

You can utilize filters and search queries to get the required details for a particular input from a dashboard or visualization tool.

6. Plugins

You can add third-party plugins to add some new visualization or other UI additions in Kibana.

7. Coordinate And Region Maps 

A coordinate and region map in Kibana helps present the visualization on the geographical map to give the users a realistic view of the data.

8. Timeline 

A timeline is another visualization tool mainly used for time-based data analysis. To work with this, you need to use basic expression language, which will help you connect to the index and perform calculations on the data to acquire the results you need. It helps more in data comparison with the previous cycle in terms of the week, month, and others.

9. Canvas

Canvas is yet another powerful feature of Kibana. Using canvas visualization, you can represent your data in various color combinations, shapes, texts, and multiple pages, collectively called the work pad.

Advantages Of Kibana As A Service

Kibana as a service also offers a lot of advantages for organizations. With Kibana, you will have an open-source browser-based visualization tool mainly used to analyze large volumes of logs in the form of line graphs, pie charts, bar graphs, heat maps, and many more others.

Kibana is also simple and easy to understand, even among beginners. Furthermore, there is the ease of converting visualization and dashboard into reports.

With its canvas visualization feature, you can efficiently analyze complex data. Timelion visualization in Kibana also helps compare data backward to understand the performance better.

These are basically how Kibana as a service works. Kibana will benefit many organizations in ways more than you can imagine. We hope you learned from this piece. Feel free to share it around.