Different ways to Load the Kibana dashboards

Metricbeat comes packaged with example Kibana dashboards, visualizations, and searches for visualizing Metricbeat data in Kibana.

To load the dashboards, you can either enable dashboard loading in the setup.dashboards section of the metricbeat.yml config file, or you can run the setup command. Dashboard loading is disabled by default.

When dashboard loading is enabled, Metricbeat uses the Kibana API to load the sample dashboards. Dashboard loading is only attempted when Metricbeat starts up. If Kibana is not available at startup, Metricbeat will stop with an error.

To enable dashboard loading, add the following setting to the config file "metricbeat.yml":

setup.dashboards.enabled: true

You need to following options in metricbeat.yml Dashboard Section:

#============================== Dashboards =====================================
# These settings control loading the sample dashboards to the Kibana index. Loading
# the dashboards is disabled by default and can be enabled either by setting the
# options here, or by using the `-setup` CLI flag or the `setup` command.
#setup.dashboards.enabled: false

# The URL from where to download the dashboards archive. By default this URL
# has a value which is computed based on the Beat name and version. For released
# versions, this URL points to the dashboard archive on the artifacts.elastic.co
# website.
#setup.dashboards.url:

Load The Dashboard From a Directory:

If no other options are set, the dashboard are loaded from the local kibana directory in the home path of the Metricbeat installation. To load dashboards from a different location, you can configure one of the following options: setup.dashboards.directory, setup.dashboards.url, or setup.dashboards.file.

setup.dashboards.directory

The directory that contains the dashboards to load. The default is the kibana folder in the home path.

Load The Dashboard From a URL:

The URL to use for downloading the dashboard archive. If this option is set, Metricbeat downloads the dashboard archive from the specified URL instead of using the local directory.

setup.dashboards.url

Load The Dashboard From a File:

The file archive (zip file) that contains the dashboards to load. If this option is set, Metricbeat looks for a dashboard archive in the specified path instead of using the local directory.

setup.dashboards.file

Important Point : When dashboard loading is enabled, Metricbeat overwrites any existing dashboards that match the names of the dashboards you are loading. This happens every time Metricbeat starts.