Table of Contents:
Introduction
Connect Your Screen
Get the big picture of your Elasticsearch data in real-time with Kibana
If you’re looking to get a solid understanding of your Elastic Stack search data, you’re going to need to be able to compile and centralize it all. Thankfully, Kibana is purpose-built to help you visualize every part of your Elasticsearch data in real-time. You can combine maps, charts, and filters into a single dashboard, along with monitoring threats, and summarizing your business performance, to help understand how your business is performing and clue you in so that you’re not left in the dark when it comes to critical business decisions.
Kibana also offers machine-learning capabilities, enabling you to detect and analyze any potential issues that might be affecting how efficient your teams can be by looking into the data recorded in Elasticsearch. This is a really handy feature for any business - and with a collaborative dashboard displayed on your workplace screens or digital signage, you and your team can be empowered to take action and get things done.
Fugo TV Dashboards & Kibana
The TV Dashboards feature inside Fugo is a super simple, easy-to-use, and quick way to integrate your digital signage with third-party dashboard solutions like Kibana. In addition to being easy-to-use, the TV Dashboards feature is built with your security in mind.
With other digital signage solutions, you have to risk your private analytical information as well as your username, password, and potential billing information. This is because other digital signage solutions require you to store your credentials on a third-party external device that can be lost, stolen, or accessed remotely, or they create a public URL on the internet that anybody looking to snoop on you can visit.
With Fugo, we’ve come up with an innovative solution to keep your information safe and sound. When you’re connecting your dashboard through our TV Dashboards feature, our CMS records all of the steps you take from login all the way through to locating your dashboard, and then encrypts those steps and sends them to a private Cloud server.
Then, when you need to display the most recent data in your dashboard, that Cloud server runs through the steps, takes a screenshot, encrypts it, and sends it securely back to Fugo CMS, and through to your digital signage. Your details are never exposed.
Best Practices for Using Tableau with Fugo
Before we start the walkthrough for connecting your Elastic account and displaying your dashboards on your digital signage screens, let’s go over a few best practices for connecting a third-party service with Fugo CMS:
1. Create a service account:
We've worked hard to develop the TV dashboards feature so that your sensitive data is completely secure. But as an extra precaution we highly recommend using a 'least privileged' service account when setting up your dashboards - this is usually an account that has read-only permissions for the dashboards you want to display on your screen(s.) You can read more about how to set up a service account with Google here.
2. Start with your dashboard URL
It's often the case that you can navigate directly to your target dashboard's URL when creating a new dashboard in Fugo. This will require you to log in, and then you’ll be redirected back to your destination. This is the quickest and most reliable journey you can make in Fugo Dashboards as it cuts out unnecessary steps in your journey.
3. Search for your dashboard
Most dashboard services have search capabilities. Instead of clicking through multiple menus, you can get to your target content quicker and more reliably by searching for it. We recommend searching the full name of the content you want to display, as partial search terms may return more items you'll have to sift through.
Connect your screens to a Fugo account
Set up your Kibana Dashboard
Before we can connect the Fugo CMS to your Kibana Dashboard, there is a little bit of setup required on the Kibana side.
1.1 Log in to your Elastic Cloud account, and go to your Dashboard settings (the little cog under the Quick Link heading):
1.2 Then select Manage and Edit Deployment. This will take you to the deployment settings screen.
1.3 Scroll down to the “Kibana” section, and select Edit User Settings.
1.4 A window will slide in from the right-hand side. It might look complicated at first, but don’t worry! Simply start a new line underneath line 9 (the line that says “To learn more, see the documentation”), and then paste in the following code:
csp:
strict: false
warnLegacyBrowsers: false
When that’s done, your window should look like this:
1.5 All set! Simply click Back at the bottom of the User settings window, and then scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save. Your deployment will go through a configuration process, and will let you know when it’s done. After that, we can move on to the next section.
Connecting Fugo
2.1 Log into your Fugo Account. If you don’t have an account yet, you can start your 14-day free trial here.
Note: TV Dashboards are a part of Fugo's Business Plan. During your free trial, you can create one dashboard. To create any more, you will need to upgrade your plan.
2.2 Make sure your screen(s) are connected to Fugo CMS. If you haven’t connected your screen(s) yet, you can find the instructions for that here.
Create a new dashboard
2.3 Click Dashboards in the top navigation bar to go to your Dashboard library. If you have not created any dashboards yet, this page will be empty.
2.4 Click Create Dashboard to get started. This will take you to the New Dashboard recorder page where you will follow the instructions to capture and preview your dashboard before publishing it to screen.
2.5 Next, enter the URL you use to access your Kibana dashboard (in this example, I’m using the Elastic Cloud solution rather than a locally-running Kibana instance, so my URL is https://cloud.elastic.co/login) - and click Go.
💡 To cut down on the navigation you’ll need to do to find your dashboard through the Fugo Recorder, we recommend pasting in the exact URL of your dashboard rather than just your login screen URL. This also helps the Fugo Recorder locate your dashboard more easily.
2.6 If this is your first time creating a TV dashboard, a popup guiding you on how to configure your Chrome browser to allow the Fugo recorder to run in incognito mode will appear. You can find our instructions for allowing incognito mode here. If this is not your first time, you can skip this step.
2.7 A new incognito window will open, displaying your Elastic login screen. Simply enter your access credentials as normal and click Log in.
2.8 Once you’re logged into your account, you’re going to need to find your dashboard. In the original window, on the right-hand side, you’ll see the Fugo Recorder noting down each step you take to find your dashboard. This is what the Fugo CMS will use to access your dashboard later, so it’s important that the Recorder is getting these steps right; you are able to edit or remove steps if you mis-click or get lost looking for your dashboard.
💡 If you’ve got more than one dashboard, we recommend using the search functionality inside Kibana to find your dashboard more accurately and more quickly. This would also be useful for the Fugo Recorder so that it doesn’t get lost if the order of your dashboards updates or the layout of your home screen changes.
2.9 Once you’ve reached the dashboard that you want to display, click Capture Dashboard in the recording pane at the bottom of your window. This will capture the whole screen, and prepare it for display on your digital signage.
2.10 The recorder will now close. At this stage, you will see a “loading” area in Fugo CMS — this may be present for several seconds to a few minutes while the Fugo recorder securely sends the instructions from the right-hand pane to the secure Cloud server, and fetches the first screenshot for display. Once it appears, ensure that it looks the way you’d expect.
2.11 From here, you can either click the Publish button to get your dashboard displaying on your existing screens, channels or in your existing playlists immediately, or select Save to allow you to come back and publish it later.
Kibana Dashboard Tips
Kibana is a very powerful and easy-to-use tool for viewing your business intelligence. However, your Elastic Stack search data will likely be very in-depth, and it could be super easy to overwhelm your team if you just throw it all up into a dashboard. Instead, you’ll need to pick carefully what you show, and even more carefully how you show it! Let’s take a look at some pointers:
Your Key Metrics. First and foremost, you need to decide what data is actually important to your team. This means sitting down with them and working out what metrics would give them the most insight into their performance, and empower them to make the most significant changes. It’s one thing to drop some data into a dashboard when you’re directly in control of it, but when you’re sat at a distance and don’t have direct control over the dashboard, it can be easy to succumb to information overload.
Less is More. Once you’ve picked your key metrics, check over them again and see if you can consolidate them or strip any out. You should be aiming to be able to fit your metrics easily onto your screen, while still leaving enough space for every element to breathe. This will give your eyes a rest from all the analytics, as well - and make it easier for everybody to absorb the information you’re showing on-screen.
Communicate Quickly. For the most important pieces of data, use bigger or heavier fonts. For less important pieces, try shrinking them down a little, or using a lighter font weight. This will lend some immediate hierarchy to your dashboard, and make it easier to glean useful insights at a glance. Color code your information, too; if a metric is moving in the right direction, try coloring it green. If it’s bad news, use red; this means that even people viewing your dashboard on workplace TV screens from across the room can understand immediately how things are going - reducing headaches, eye strain, and making the most of your Fugo setup.
If you’re looking for more tips related to Kibana and Elastic, you can find a great guide from their experts by clicking here.
How was this guide? If you’ve got any feedback, or any further questions about connecting your Kibana dashboard to your Fugo CMS and the TV Dashboards feature, please don’t hesitate to email our support team at support@fugo.ai. They’re always happy to help!