Creating Kibana Visualizations with Bike Share Data

I’ve been working with Elastic for a few years now, and one of the most underappreciated features of Elastic is Kibana as a visualization tool. Lots of people think of Elastic as a logging stack (probably because most of the focus has been ELK or Beats) and Log Data is a great use of Elastic, but Elastic is a really good tool for data discovery of any sort – not just APM or Software logs.

In this walkthrough, we will:

• Download public bike trip data and create an index mapping
• Download and run the RocDevESLoader tool
• Create and use a Kibana index pattern
• Build and save some visualizations
• Create a saved dashboard

Introduction

To follow along with this tutorial, you’ll need a few things:

• A REST API tool such as Postman
• An Elastic cluster (or standalone server) running Elastic 7.6+ Basic (Not Apache2 or ODFE) with Kibana attached.
• The ability to build/run a C# application (You can use Visual Studio Community Edition if you’d like)
• I like to use Git BASH on Windows

If you use Postman to go to your Elastic URL, it should look something like this:

Just to give some hardware context, I’ll be running this ES Cluster (and Kibana) as RPM packages on a VM that has:

• 4 CPU Cores (2.6GHz)
• 16GB of RAM
• 512GB SSD

This level of hardware isn’t out of reach if you’re just making a VM or running a docker from your laptop.

Once you’re there, let’s move on to Downloading Public Bike Trip Data.