Kibana visualization cheat-sheet

It is exciting to see how Oracle brings modern capabilities to its legacy PeopleSoft ERP. What started as a replacement of an obsolete Secure Enterprise Search (SES) platform, now opens up so many new opportunities for data exploration and analysis! While it is not something truly revolutionary, as for example Stéphane Lapierre experimented with a very similar concept back in 2016, it's definitely cutting edge in the officially supported PeopleSoft space.

PeopleSoft now seamlessly integrates with Kibana, allowing transparent user access to various visualizations. While there is no development necessary, we still need a technical user to build the visualization source (query), search definition, push data into ElasticSearch and develop/import the visualizations back into PeopleSoft.


My colleague from Florida State University, Sasank Vemana, put together a great video on developing Kibana dashboards. It is fairly lengthy, and below is a summary of the steps required to build a visualization in PeopleSoft:

1. Build index data source via PS Query or Connected Query
 > Menu Path: Reporting Tools > Query Manager
  • Ensure the query has a drilling URL - for more info on drilling URLs see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OP5boqMtjA
  • Ensure you have a LASTUPDDTM (not less than or equal to) as a prompt - this is necessary for the incremental indexing - 01/01/1900 12:00:00.000000AM
  • After building the query, be sure to test it to make sure that it returns some data
2. Create Search Configuration
 > Menu Path: People Tools > Search Framework > Designer
 - Create Search Definition (specify the LASTUPDDTM & URL + Title / Summary)
   - Ensure you have a Last modified date pointing to the query LASTUPDDTM
   - Add URL Link field pointing to the Query Drilling URL
   - Map appropriate search attributes
 - Create Search Category (Grouping of the search definition) - check "Search Group" for searching within the global PS search
 - Configure Search Context (optional)

3. Deploy Search Index
 > Menu Path: PeopleTools > Search Framework > Administration > Deploy/Delete Object
 - Create the structure of the search - pick you search definition and deploy in "Deploy Search Definition" menu, then "Schedule Search Index"

4. Build/Crawl Search Index
 > Menu Path: PeopleTools > Search Framework > Administration > Schedule Search Index
 - Populate the search index with results of search definition query
 
5. Create visualizations in Kibana:
 - Login to Kibana - it should run on the same host as ElasticSearch on port 5601
 - Default user is esadmin/Esadmin1, DB name would be located in tnsnames.ora
 - Create your index patter than you specified in PS
 - Create your visualizations, as needed. See https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/index.html for more information.

6. Create Kibana dashboards:
  - Make sure there are separate dasboards for the PeopleSoft tile view and for the page views

7. In PeopleSoft, import the newly created dashboards so that PeopleSoft knows about them
 > Menu Path: PeopleTools > Search Framework > Administration > Import Kibana Dashboards

8. Create tiles / components using Kibana Visualizations
 > Menu Path: PeopleTools > Search Framework > Administration >Kibana Visualizations
 - The tiles are created in the following Portal Nav Structure - Fluid Structure Content > Fluid Pages > PeopleSoft Applications

9. Grant required privileges
 > Menu Path: PeopleTools > Search Framework > Administration >Kibana Privileges
  - Allows to configure access rights to the dashboards - whether it they can only view or can also edit

10. Redeploy the dashboards back into Kibana
 > Menu Path: PeopleTools > Search Framework > Administration >Deploy Kibana Dashboards
   - At this time, we need to push the changes we made in PeopleSoft back into Kibana, so that it is aware of the changes

In case you run into troubles adding visualizations, please check if ElasticSearch index has any values. In case step #3 (Deploy Search Index) was a success, but Step #4 (Build Index) either failed or returned no results, Kibana will not display the index and you will not be able to continue building visualizations. To check Kibana index, go to the Kibana Console and check to see that the index has been created and pushed to the ElasticSearch. An empty index won't be available for building visualizations:

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