kibana

Kibana is the visualization layer for Elasticsearch. If your data lives in an Elastic cluster, this is how you build dashboards, run queries, and monitor everything from logs to APM traces. The UI handles everything from ad-hoc searches to complex aggregations without writing code.

Self-hosting is free under the Elastic License 2.0, but running Elasticsearch underneath is the real commitment. Plan for a dedicated cluster, index management, and ongoing maintenance. This is not a weekend project for small teams.

Solo developers and small teams doing log analysis can get by with the free tier and a managed Elastic Cloud instance (starts at $95/mo). Enterprise teams running their own clusters get the full power but need dedicated ops. The paid tiers add security features (SSO, field-level permissions), machine learning, and cross-cluster search.

The catch: Kibana without Elasticsearch is nothing, and Elasticsearch at scale is expensive to operate. If you just need dashboards over Postgres or CSV data, look at Metabase or Grafana instead.