querying Elasticsearch with Powershell with a little help from Kibana

Kibana is a great dash-boarding tool to easily query an Elasticsearch store on the fly without having to know exactly how to write an Elasticsearch query. For example if you’re using Logstash to dump all your logfiles into an Elasticsearch DB and use Kibana to nail down that specific weird exception you’re seeing.
Kibana is great to show some graphs and give a pretty good overview, but what if you want that query data and do some processing on that? You can’t really export it from the dashboard, but for each of those table or graph panels on your dashboard you can click the “Inspect” button and see what Elasticsearch query is used to get the data for the panel.

It looks something like this:

curl -XGET 'http://yourserver:9999/logstash_index_production/_search?pretty' -d '{
"query": { ...
}'

This is a curl statement and contains all you need to run the same query using PowerShell. The easiest thing to do is to copy the whole JSON statement into a text file and strip out the curl bit and the URL. You keep the URL handy because that’s the URL you’ll need to target in the Invoke-Restmethod call.
If you refactor it into something like the statements below and save it as a .ps1 file you can run it from the command-line and get the results back as PowerShell objects parsed from the JSON result. Yes. PowerShell is that cool. ;)

$elasticQuery = @"
{
"query": { ... }
}
"@

$elasticUri = 'http://yourserver:9999/logstash_index_production/_search?pretty'
Invoke-Restmethod -uri $elasticUri -method POST -Body $elasticQuery

To store the results in a local variable you just run it like this:

$r = .\RunElasticQuery.ps1

Now you’re free to run all sorts of funky processing on the data or perhaps dump it to a CSV file.

If you’re good enough at the Elasticsearch DSL you can even skip the Kibana query shortcut and modify the query itself in your PowerShell script.

Photo by Jeroen Bennink, cc-licensed.