Elasticsearch is fantastic to index your data so that it can be searched by its lightning-fast search engine. With Kibana, you also get the ability to analyse and visualise that data. Both of these products are provided for free by Elastic.

Installing Java Runtime Environment

Elastic products are developed in Java, so you’ll need the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to run them. Get the latest JRE from the relevant ugly Oracle downloads page. Either use the .exe installer, or download the .zip file and then extract the folder inside.

Either way, take note of the JRE folder location and add it as an environment variable. To do this, hit the start menu and type “environment variables“:

In the window that comes up, go on Environment Variables…:

You will now see the user and system environment variables. Hit New… under the System variables:

Name it JAVA_HOME, and in the value put in the path to the JRE folder (not its bin folder):

You can now OK out of the various dialog windows.

Setting up Elasticsearch

Go to the Elasticsearch product page, and hit Download:

In the next page, download the ZIP file:

Extract the folder in the .zip file somewhere.

You can now run elasticsearch.bat. If you get “The syntax of the command is incorrect”, you probably didn’t set the JAVA_HOME environment variable as explained in the previous section.

elasticsearch.bat

Running this command, you should see a bunch of initialisation output:

…and if you browse to localhost:9200, you should see some JSON returned:

Now that we know it’s working, we can install it as a Windows service. So press Ctrl+C to kill the instance of Elasticsearch you just ran, and instead run:

elasticsearch-service.bat install

This should install it as a service:

This installs it as Manual startup type, and does not start it. You probably want to change that to Automatic (Delayed Start), from the Services window in Microsoft Windows, and also Start it. Once you have done that, give it a few seconds to start, and then verify again that you get a response from localhost:9200.

Setting up Kibana

Next, we will set up Kibana. Grab the Windows .zip file from the Kibana downloads page:

Extract it wherever your heart desires.

Make sure Elasticsearch is running. Then, in Kibana’s bin folder, run kibana.bat:

kibana.bat

Some text will be written to the console as Kibana is initialised, and then you should be able to go to localhost:5601 and actually get a webpage:

Now we know that it works. Let’s set it up as a service. Kill the instance we just ran using Ctrl+C first.

Oh crap, Kibana does not come with a service installer! What are we gonna do?

Enter NSSM, the Non-Sucking Service Manager, which we can use to install just about any application as a Windows service, using either the command line or an interactive GUI. After downloading NSSM, we can install Kibana as a Windows service with a command like the following from NSSM’s win64 folder:

nssm install "Kibana 5.2.2" C:\[...]\kibana-5.2.2-windows-x86\bin\kibana.bat

With an elevated command prompt, we can also configure the Windows service, such as setting the startup type and the description:

nssm set "Kibana 5.2.2" Start "SERVICE_DELAYED_AUTO_START"
nssm set "Kibana 5.2.2" Description "Kibana lets you visualize your Elasticsearch data"

Finally, we start the service:

nssm start "Kibana 5.2.2"

If all goes well:

…then we can go back to localhost:5601 and verify that it’s really running.

With that, it’s all set up. All that’s needed is an index with some data that you can use Kibana to visualise, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.