Kibana – DevSecOps Tool Overview

Source: Dev.to

Overview of the Tool

Kibana is an intuitive web‑based data visualization and analytics interface that works on top of Elasticsearch data. It lets users search, explore, visualize, and build dashboards from large datasets in real time. While part of the Elastic Stack (formerly ELK Stack), Kibana itself focuses on turning raw log and metric data stored in Elasticsearch into interactive charts, graphs, and dashboards.

Key Features of Kibana

• Data Visualization & Dashboards — Create interactive line charts, bar graphs, pie charts, heatmaps, timelion graphs, and maps that update in real time.
• Discover & Search — Explore, filter, and query Elasticsearch data with powerful search features.
• Advanced Dashboards — Combine multiple visualizations into customizable dashboards for system or business insights.
• Security & Access Control — Role‑based access control (RBAC) and secure spaces allow restricted access to specific dashboards and data.
• Reporting & Share — Export dashboards to PDF/CSV, and shareable links.
• Canvas — Build custom, pixel‑perfect presentations using live Elasticsearch data.
• Plugins & Extensibility — Extend capabilities using plugins like Vega, Prometheus exporter, etc.

How Kibana Fits into DevOps / DevSecOps

In DevOps

• Helps monitor application performance and infrastructure health by visualizing logs and metrics.
• Supports troubleshooting and root‑cause analysis through dashboards that show deployment, error, and usage data in real time.

In DevSecOps

• Enables teams to visualize security logs and threat data to detect anomalies and unusual patterns.
• Used for incident investigation, alerting, and compliance reporting, improving threat monitoring and proactive response.

Kibana effectively bridges operational performance and security analysis, making it a key observability component in modern DevOps/DevSecOps workflows.

Programming Language

Kibana is primarily developed using JavaScript and TypeScript, with front‑end UI components built on React and a backend that interacts with Elasticsearch’s REST APIs.

Parent Company

The tool is developed and maintained by Elastic, the company behind the Elastic Stack, which includes Elasticsearch, Logstash, Beats, and Kibana.

Open Source or Paid?

Hybrid licensing model

• The core Kibana product is open‑source/available under source‑available licenses with community features.
• Commercial/paid features (advanced security, machine learning, enterprise alerting, etc.) are available via Elastic’s paid subscription tiers.

You can use the basic version for free, but enterprises often choose paid subscriptions for full security and analytics capabilities.