Kibana’s map functionality is a powerful way to visualise data that has a location element in it. I was recently working with data about ships at sea, and whilst the built in Road map
is very good it doesn’t show much maritime detail.
![maps01](/images/2021/03/maps01.png)
Kibana’s map visualisation has the option to pull in additional visual information from other places (known as tile servers). I found a list of Tile servers, which had details of OpenSeaMap which includes:
beacons, buoys and other seamarks, port information, repair shops, ship supplies and much more, but also shops, restaurants and places of interest
![maps05](/images/2021/03/maps05.png)
Adding the tile server details is relatively easy - the trick is getting the incantation of the URL exactly right (which is why I’m even writing this up in the first place, because it took me a bit of fiddling).
-
Click on
Add layer
-
Select
Tile Map Service
-
Enter the details
-
Attribution text:
OpenSeaMap
-
Attrinbution link:
http://openseamap.org/
-
Click the
Add layer
button at the bottom, and optionally give the layer a name on the next screen, and clickSave & close
You now get visuals from OpenSeaMap overlaid, showing things like shipping lanes at a high level…
![maps07](/images/2021/03/maps07.png)
…down to much more detailed attributes:
![maps06](/images/2021/03/maps06.png)
Of course, Kibana is not just a map viewer - it’s a data visualisation tool in which maps provide the canvas on which to illustrate the data, like this:
![maps08](/images/2021/03/maps08.png)