BI 01 — Dashboard & Data Exploration Basics

SME Track: BI & Data Analysts

Presenter: Pramod Saripalli

Date: 2026-09-02

SLB × Elastic Workshop Program

Overview

Kibana Discover, Lens visualizations, and dashboards for BI users.

Where this applies

These labs run on Observability Serverless — a fully managed project so you can practice without cluster operations.

The same capabilities you explore here — ES|QL, Streams, AI Assistant, Agent Builder, Workflows, and SLOs — are available on Elastic Cloud Hosted (ECH) and self-managed deployments.

Serverless mainly saves operational toil (sizing, ILM, Fleet, upgrades). Your observability skills transfer directly.

Session topics

  • Navigating Discover, Lens, and dashboards
  • Filtering, slicing, and exporting
  • Entry-level friendly — no prior Elastic experience required

Why these features?

🔍DiscoverExplore raw telemetry before you visualize
Dashboards & LensGrafana-style views, Elastic-native drilldowns
ES|QLOne query language for logs, metrics, and traces

Use → to see why each feature matters for SLB.

Why Discover?

Explore raw telemetry before you visualize

Without it

Jump straight to dashboards and miss the field that explains the outage.

With Discover

Discover filters, sorts, and column-picks any index pattern — the fastest way to learn your schema.

  • Entry point for BI and dev users new to Elastic
  • Validate data quality before building Lens charts
  • Export and save views for repeat investigations
Filter
Columns
Insight

Why Dashboards & Lens?

Grafana-style views, Elastic-native drilldowns

Without it

Static panels that break when fields change — no path from chart to raw events without switching tools.

With Dashboards & Lens

Lens builds visualizations drag-and-drop; dashboards link to Discover, APM, and ES|QL for drilldown.

  • Familiar panel workflow for Grafana users
  • Share operational and business review boards in one project
  • Markdown KPI panels for runbook links and escalation info
Lens panel
Dashboard
Drilldown

Why ES|QL?

One query language for logs, metrics, and traces

Without it

Different syntax per signal — PromQL for metrics, LogQL for logs, trace UI only — context switching slows incidents.

With ES|QL

ES|QL pipes data through filters, stats, and joins across observability datasets in Logs Explorer and Dev Tools.

  • Faster investigations with reusable query patterns
  • Same syntax in Logs Explorer on Serverless, ECH, and self-managed
  • AI Assistant can draft and explain ES|QL for your team
FROM logs-*
STATS / WHERE
Answer

Hands-on lab

Your lab uses Elastic Observability Serverless for a zero-ops learning environment.

The steps and features are the same on ECH and on-prem — follow the assignment panel when Kibana opens.

Instruqt track: slb-sme-bi-analysts

Resources

  • Registration: events.elastic.co/slbworkshops
  • Repo: github.com/poulsbopete/slb-workshops
  • Use ← → arrow keys to navigate slides