Stick With It - Pinned Filters in Kibana

One of the new features that was added to Kibana in version 4.1 is something we call Pinned Filters. Pinned Filters allows you to craft filters in one part of Kibana and bring those filters with you to all the other parts. It started as an enhancement idea from a user in the IRC channel, and now we can't imagine using Kibana without it. 

Creating Pinned Filters is a simple, 1-click operation. You start by creating some filters, for example, by clicking on document values in Discover.

Next, you need to decide what filters you'd like to take with you. Once you've decided, simply hover over the filter and click the pin icon, and you'll see a pin icon show up on the filter. This icon lets you quickly see which filters are pinned. You can click on the pin icon again to un-pin the filter. 

If you've got a lot of filters and you simply want to pin them all, you could spend your time clicking on each one, but there's a faster way. If you click on the Actions menu in the filter bar, it will open a menu that allows you manipulate all of the filters, simply click on Pin.

Now that you've got one or more pinned filters, when you go to another app, like Visualize, the filters will follow along. It's that simple!

Generally, users use filters to tease out interesting records in their data set, and pinned filters let them get more out of that effort. For example, after filtering down data in a visualization, they can take those filters over to Discover and see the records responsible for that visualization. 

That concludes our crash course in Pinned Filters, now go forth and pin!