Beginners Guide to Elasticsearch and Kibana

Simple steps to get started with Elasticsearch and Kibana

Overview

Elasticsearch is an open source distributed search engine which provides near real time search capabilities and is widely used as a data store for logging, searching, data monitoring and more. Well known for its RESTful interface, scalability, speed and resilience.
Elasticsearch is being used by well known companies like Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, Slack, Twilio, etc.

Kibana is an open source data visualisation tool which is used on top of elasticsearch as an UI for monitoring and managing elasticsearch data.

Steps to Setup

Installing Elasticsearch

Download the latest version of elasticsearch from the official elastic website.
If you want to download any older version or a specific version, click here

Installing Kibana

Download the latest version of kibana from the official elastic website.
If you want to download any older version or a specific version, click here

Note: If you are installing older versions of elasticsearch and kibana then you need to make sure that both the versions are compatible with each other. The versions are compatible if both have the same major release version like 7.x or 8.x
For checking the compatibility you can refer this official documentation from elastic

Quickstart

Running elasticsearch from Command Line Interface (CLI)

To start elasticsearch, move into the directory where you have downloaded elasticsearch and use the following command,

./bin/elasticsearch

Running kibana from Command Line Interface (CLI)

To start kibana, move into the directory where you have downloaded kibana and use the following command,

./bin/kibana

Once both elasticsearch and kibana are up and running you can access them locally,

localhost:9200 for elasticsearch
localhost:5601 for kibana

Running elasticsearch and kibana as a daemon or a background process

Instead of starting elasticsearch and kibana manually each time through CLI, you can start it as a daemon

./bin/elasticsearch -d -p pid
./bin/kibana -d -p pid

Note: In order to stop the daemon use the following command,
pkill -f pid
where pid is the process id

Have fun in your elasticsearch and kibana journey :)