Visualise complex data in style using Timelion
OUR EXPERT
Simon Quain is a site reliability engineer who likes discovering open datasets online to play around with in the Elastic Stack.
You’ve probably heard of Elasticsearch – the search engine that enables you to index and then quickly search through your data. You may have created a few visualisations in Kibana, the GUI for Elasticsearch, pointing and clicking your way through the sleek interface. What you may not have used is a lesser-known visualisation plugin called Timelion.
Timelion is a fantastic visualisation creation tool that makes it possible to write out your queries in its simple and powerful expression language to display graphs. It’s used for displaying time-series data such as population growth or hits to your website. With Timelion, we can calculate moving averages, display the difference between the data for last week and today, and do some basic anomaly detection. It’s a useful tool to know how to work with. Let’s get started.
Installation
If you’re a regular Linux Format reader, there are docker compose examples for setting up a cluster in LXF261. Otherwise installing Elasticsearch and Kibana is relatively straightforward. The only requirement is Java, which you may already have installed. If not a simple sudo apt install default-jre installs it on Debian-based distros or a sudo dnf install java should do the same for the Red Hat family of distros.
Then you just need to go to and download the latest version of and Kibana . Then you can extract it with tar -xvzf kibana-7.8.1-linux-x86_64.tar.gz , change into the extracted directory and run ./bin/kibana & to fire up the Kibana instance. When you’ve done exactly the same steps to set up , replacing ‘kibana’ for ‘elasticsearch’, you should be able to navigate to in your favourite browser and see a shiny new Kibana interface to play around with. If you prefer to install packages with a package manager, the same link as before has information about adding the Elastic repo to your system and installing the Kibana and packages that way.
