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.

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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

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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).

  1. Click on Add layer

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  2. Select Tile Map Service

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  3. Enter the details

  4. Click the Add layer button at the bottom, and optionally give the layer a name on the next screen, and click Save & close

You now get visuals from OpenSeaMap overlaid, showing things like shipping lanes at a high level…

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…down to much more detailed attributes:

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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:

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