Is it possible to create an XY (aka scatter) plot using Kibana 4?

Question

I have a few million documents in an ElasticSearch index with some numeric fields, say foo and bar. Is there any way to use Kibana 4 to create a graph with foo values on the X axis and bar values on the Y axis? Like a very, very basic chart one might create using Excel.

I'm fine with sampling/aggregations of some kind. I understand that these tools won't show me a plot with 20 million data points. I'm just trying to see if there's some obvious relationship between foo and bar by creating a graph.

Answer 1

To just plot the correlation between revenue and employee count I would just use a line chart like this:

In order to justify creating a scatter plot chart though (since they're awesome and I wanted to) I generated some fake data that looked something like this:

{
  name: faker.company.companyName(),
  employees: _.random(3, 30),
  revenue: _.random(10000, 100000),
  industry: _.sample(industries)
}

And plotted it in visualize by breaking it down piece-by-piece:

1. Start with a line chart
2. Switch to Options tab of sidebar (since 4.1)
   • Uncheck "Show Connecting Lines"
   • Check "Scale Y-Axis to Data Bounds"
3. Switch back to the Data tab
4. Modify the "Y-Axis"
   • use the Average aggregation
   • on the employees field
5. Add a "Dot Size" metric
   • use the Unique Count aggregation
   • on the company field
6. Add a "Split Lines" bucket
   • use the Terms aggregation
   • on the industry field
   • I like to set the size close to the cardinality of my data
7. Add an "X-Axis"
   • use the Histogram aggregation
   • on the revenue field
   • guess an interval, you will need to play with this a bit
8. Finally, click Apply

This configuration is pretty complex, but the resulting visualization shows a lot of information.