Parallel Coordinates Visualization in the ELK Stack

Abstract

Modern large-scale distributed computing systems, processing large volumes of data, require mature monitoring systems able to control and track in re-sources, networks, computing tasks, queues and other components. In recent years, the ELK stack has become very popular for the monitoring of computing environment, largely due to the efficiency and flexibility of the Elastic Search storage and wide variety of Kibana visualization tools. The analysis of computing infrastructure metadata often requires the visual exploration of multiple parameters simultaneously on one graphical image. Stacked bar charts, heat maps, radar charts are widely used for the multivariate visual data analysis, but these methods have limitations on the number of parameters. In this research the authors propose to enhance the capacity of Kibana, adding Parallel Coordinates diagram - one of the most powerful method for visual interactive analysis of high-dimensional data. It allows to compare many variables together and observe correlations between them. This work describes the development process of Parallel Coordinates as a Kibana plugin, and demonstrates an example of visual data analysis based on the Nginx logs metadata.