You like Kibana? You will love Canvas

Canvas is a feature that comes inside our beloved Kibana dashboard and allows us to visualize and present our data from our Elasticsearch our way.

Whether you are working with application metrics, security events, infrastructure logs, business-related data or even your side projects, as long as you put the generated info in an Elasticsearch instance, you will be able to display them in an elegant way.

Create workpads with combined data from your Elasticsearch and convert them into beautiful charts, graphs, progress monitors, infographics, reports… The only limit is your imagination (yes, for real)!

You already have a visual identity ? Import your logo, your color schemes, your css to get a consistent interface all over and reuse them everywhere! Share them with your users and customers with ease so your branding is really homogeneous.

Not having a visual identity? There are tons of color palettes and templates you can play around with.

Make your workpads dynamic using time-series data, add your Elastic Maps into your workpads, choose how often it should be updated.

Canvas also lets you customize your workspace with backgrounds, colors, fonts, images and more.

Is it easy to use

What a question! You should know how simple is the Elastic Stack experience!

Canvas arrives out of the box inside Kibana on Clever Cloud, with features like syntax highlighting, mouse-over context-sensitive help, drag and drop publishing, dark mode and more to help you create pixel-perfect visuals with your data.

Use Elasticsearch SQL to design aggregations like you already do in your applications and display them in your workpads.

Canvas comes with its own library of functions to empower your imagination but if it’s not enough, with the Elastic plugin framework, you can also add your own plugins or community ones no matter how experienced in development you are.

And thanks to Clever Cloud, keeping everything in operating condition is pretty simple, as we manage this for you. While as usual providing you a Europe-based infrastructure, GDPR compliant and protected from Cloud Act.

Reuse your workpads everywhere

You might wonder: what can I do with my awesome creations? Well, actually almost everything!

You can, of course, use them in your Kibana, but here are some examples of usage you can have outside of your dashboards:

• export your workpads as JSON
• generate one shot PDF
• automate PDF reporting with a POST endpoint
• display your workpads on websites (and customize them there to match the design of the page)
• get live reporting on screens in your office, retail points or any place
• add real data to your weekly, monthly … emails

Once again, the only limit is your imagination!

Do not hesitate to try out Canvas, it is really easy to use and available in one click and stay tuned, next time I’ll show you how I indexed meetups data into Elastic.