When Kibana was started, it started on port 5601, and it tried to connect to Elasticsearch running on port 9200. What if we want to change some of these settings? All the configurations of Kibana are stored in a file called kibana.yml, which is present under the config folder, under $KIBANA_HOME. When this file is opened in your favorite text editor, it contains many properties (key-value pairs) that are commented by default. What this means is that, unless those are overridden, the value specified in the property is considered the default value. To uncomment the property, remove the # before the property and save the file.
The following are some of the key configuration settings that you should look for when starting out with Kibana:
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server.port |
This setting specifies the port Kibana will be serving requests on. It defaults to 5601. |
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server.host |
This specifies the address to which the Kibana server will bind. IP addresses and hostnames are both valid values. It defaults to localhost. |
|
elasticsearch.url |
This is the URL of the Elasticsearch instance to use for all your queries. It defaults to http://localhost:9200. If your Elasticsearch is running on a different host/port, make sure you update this property. |
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elasticsearch.username elasticsearch.password |
If Elasticsearch is secured, specify the username/password details that have access to Elasticsearch here. In the next chapter (Chapter 8, Elastic X-pack), we will be exploring how to secure Elasticsearch. |
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server.name |
A human-readable display name that identifies this Kibana instance. Defaults to hostname. |
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kibana.index |
Kibana uses an index in Elasticsearch to store saved searches, visualizations, and dashboards. Kibana creates a new index if the index doesn't already exist. Defaults to .kibana. |