How to setup Elasticsearch and Kibana with Pulse v5

This post is for Pulse 5 only , with Pulse 6 you don’t have to install Elasticsearch and Kibnana as the Pulse installer will do it for you.

Elasticsearch/Kibana is probably the most exciting new feature of Pulse since the migration feature. With Pulse v5.7, Pulse can now send data to Elasticsearch, one of the best open-source indexing/search engine. With Kibana you will be able to build your own dashboard based on the Pulse data stored in Elasticsearch:

#If Elasticsearch is already installed
If Elasticsearch is already installed you just need to set the Elastic URL in Pulse.cfg:

  1. Stop Pulse services

  2. Go to Pulse.cfg, update the config
    [ElasticSearch]
    Nodes = http://ElasticServerName:ElasticPort
    IncludeTM1Top = True
    IncludeMessageLogs = True

  3. Start Pulse services

#Install Elasticsearch and Kibana
To install Elasticsearch and Kibana you can either follow this installation guide which describes the installation steps for a windows environment: Pulse - Kibana 6.1 Installation Guide.pdf (1.9 MB)

Or you can follow the official guide from the Elastic team:

Pulse data in Elasticsearch

Once everthing is setup, Pulse will send data every seconds to Elasticsearch following the index format. In your Elasticsearch database you will find 8 Pulse indices:

  • pulse-disk-: information about the server disk (servername, diskspace…)
  • pulse-instance-: information about all TM1 instances (CPU, memory…)
  • pulse-server-: information about the TM1 server (CPU, memory…)
  • pulse-top-: information about TM1 top
  • pulse-process-: information about TM1 processes (Start time, Runtime…)
  • pulse-chore-: information about TM1 chores (Start time, End time ….)
  • pulse-message-log-: information about message log (Error messages…)
  • pulse-session-: information about the sessions.

Each index contains fields, for more information about each field, you can download the following Excel file:
Pulse - Elasticsearch indices.xlsx (13.9 KB)

Pulse Kibana objects

To help you to start exploring the Pulse data in Elasticsearch, we provide pre-built Kibana dashboards that you can import into your Kibana application: Kibana objects.
Before importing these objects you have to create first all Pulse indices.

Questions about Elasticsearch and Kibana

If you have an issue with the installation or if you have a question about features in Elasticsearch or Kibana, the best place to get an answer is discuss.elastic.co. Elastic and Kibana already have a strong community on their forum, you have a better chance to get an answer from the Elastic forum than the Cubewise Forum.
You can still post questions on the Cubewise forum about the Pulse data in Elasticsearch but for general features or how to do stuff in Kibana you should better go on their forum.

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For those (like me) who don’t have Java 64 bit, ElasticSearch will pop an error message asking for the JVM 64bit.

Here the link to download it: https://www.java.com/en/download/windows-64bit.jsp