Visualize website usage in kibana using elastic-stack

Question

Goal: I want to create a dashboard which shows user requests made to my website. For this, I created a filter in my java web-app and started capturing user requests and storing them in an ES index. The document is in the form of:

{
  'user': 'user1',
  'url': 'domain.com/page1',
  'hitcount': 12
}

So, now I have an index which contains the information as to how many times a user requested which URLs. Now, I want to create visualizations to show usage trends per user.

Question:

1. Which visualizations should be used for this use-case?

2. If I need to show the change in user-trends over time, how should I save the data? For e.g. is there a visualization where I could show, that a user has stopped/reduced requesting a page and now accesses a different page more frequently. Any direction will be helpful. Note: I understand, this could be done with grafana + prometheus, but I wish to do this with elastic stack.

Answer 1

I’d recommend logging user requests to a log file and have filebeat read and index them into ES. It is better to send non aggregated data into ES and then let ES aggregate it to create required visualizations