Kibana

The Kibana chart in OpenStack-Helm Infra provides visualization for logs indexed into Elasticsearch. These visualizations provide the means to view logs captured from services deployed in cluster and targeted for collection by Fluentbit.

Authentication

The Kibana deployment includes a sidecar container that runs an Apache reverse proxy to add authentication capabilities for Kibana. The username and password are configured under the Kibana entry in the endpoints section of the chart’s values.yaml.

The configuration for Apache can be found under the conf.httpd key, and uses a helm-toolkit function that allows for including gotpl entries in the template directly. This allows the use of other templates, like the endpoint lookup function templates, directly in the configuration for Apache.

Configuration

Kibana’s configuration is driven by the chart’s values.yaml file. The configuration options are found under the following keys:

conf:
  elasticsearch:
    pingTimeout: 1500
    preserveHost: true
    requestTimeout: 30000
    shardTimeout: 0
    startupTimeout: 5000
  i18n:
    defaultLocale: en
  kibana:
    defaultAppId: discover
    index: .kibana
  logging:
    quiet: false
    silent: false
    verbose: false
  ops:
    interval: 5000
  server:
    host: localhost
    maxPayloadBytes: 1048576
    port: 5601
    ssl:
      enabled: false

The case of the sub-keys is important as these values are injected into Kibana’s configuration configmap with the toYaml function. More information on the configuration options and available settings can be found in the official Kibana documentation.

Installation

helm install –namespace=<namespace> local/kibana –name=kibana

Setting Time Field

For Kibana to successfully read the logs from Elasticsearch’s indexes, the time field will need to be manually set after Kibana has successfully deployed. Upon visiting the Kibana dashboard for the first time, a prompt will appear to choose the time field with a drop down menu. The default time field for Elasticsearch indexes is ‘@timestamp’. Once this field is selected, the default view for querying log entries can be found by selecting the “Discover”