We are happy to announce a contest open to all ELK Stack users for the best Kibana dashboard!

The winner of this contest will receive a full package to AWS re:Invent 2017, to be held in Las Vegas this November! The package will include the ticket, flight, hotel, and transportation to and from the Las Vegas airport.

One of the renowned features in Kibana is the ability to analyze log data using beautiful visualizations and dashboards.

At Logz.io, not a week goes by without learning about a new way our users are slicing and dicing their logs with Kibana dashboards. The list of use cases is endless. Application and performance monitoring, security and compliance, business intelligence, and customer support — these are just a few of the ways in which log data can be analyzed and visualized using Kibana dashboards.

Constructing these dashboards is fun but not always a walk in the park. To help our users and the ELK community as a whole, we introduced ELK Apps — a library of premade dashboards and visualizations for various log types. This library is constantly growing and now consists of hundreds of different visualizations and dashboards. While these objects are available as part of Logz.io, they can be converted for use in local Kibana deployments as well (see the process below).

We now invite all ELK users to share their Kibana dashboards with the community for a chance at winning the full package to AWS re:Invent 2017.

What are the rules?

To participate in the contest, there are two main requirements:

Submit a Kibana dashboard to Logz.io’s ELK Apps library (see detailed instructions below). Complete an online form with the details of the submission.

All submissions are to be entered by 12:00 p.m. PDT on September 15, 2017.

A panel of judges from the Logz.io R&D, DevOps, and product teams will then determine the top five dashboards based on the following criteria: relevance and interest of the use case, the number of visualizations, and the number of visualization types.

An announcement of the final five contenders will be made on October 2, 2017. These contenders will each be required to write an article describing their dashboards that will be published on the Logz.io blog under the participant’s name and company once the finalists are announced.

A public poll will be then opened to the community. The dashboard receiving the most votes will be announced as the winner in mid-October.

A full list of terms and conditions can be found on the Logz.io website.

Great! Where do I sign up?

To get a chance to win a ride to Las Vegas in November, complete the following steps:

Step 1: Submit a Kibana dashboard to Logz.io’s ELK Apps

Your first step is to develop a dashboard in Kibana and submit it to ELK Apps.

This is done from within Logz.io, meaning you will first need to sign up for a free trial and ship some sample data. Signing up takes one minute and can be done on the Logz.io website.

Please use #kibanacontest2017 as the company name.

Shipping data can be done using a variety of methods, with instructions for each method available on the Log Shipping page in Logz.io. Tip: The easiest way is to send file-based data using Filebeat.

The free trial allows for shipping up to 1GB of data a day with three days of retention. If you require an extension of this plan, please contact us at contest@logz.io.

Another important tip — when developing your dashboard, I strongly recommend keeping in mind that the more useful your dashboard is to the community, the higher the chance that it will advance to the second stage of the contest. Creating a dashboard for common log types, for example, has greater value to the community than a dashboard for custom application logs.

Once you’ve shipped data and built your dashboard, save and submit it to ELK Apps by simply hitting the Contribute button within the Logz.io UI.

When filling out the details about your dashboard, use #kibanacontest2017 in the name field.

This will help us associate the dashboard to your submission. Take note of the dashboard name — you will need it in the next step (if you forgot the name of your dashboard, you can find it in the list of your saved dashboards in Kibana).

Additional details on submitting dashboards to ELK Apps can be found here.

Step 2: Fill in the submission form

Once you’ve submitted the dashboard to ELK Apps, please fill in the submission details using this online form. Please be as elaborate as possible when describing your dashboard.

ELK Apps → Your Kibana

The idea of this contest is to share Kibana dashboards with the community. This is also the reason we recommend your dashboard suit a common use case. The more useful the dashboard, the better.

Submitting objects via Logz.io’s ELK Apps will help us to evaluate the dashboards and determine the final five contenders better. If you would like to convert these dashboards for use in your own ELK deployment, you can run a simple conversion script that will make all the necessary changes (note that it requires node.js).

Export the dashboard from Logz.io using the export option (Management → Saved Objects).

Make a backup copy of the ‘export.json’ file just in case, and then use the following command to run the script:

$ node index.js <<exported_dashboard_filename>>

Once converted, import the object into your Kibana from the same location (Management → Saved Objects).

We are looking forward to seeing new examples of how Kibana can be used to visualize data. The more the merrier — please share with your colleagues on social media with the hashtag #kibanacontest2017.

If you have any questions whatsoever, please contact us at: contest@logz.io.

May the best dashboard win!