OpenSearch Dashboards is the web frontend for OpenSearch, letting operators look up, search, query, and visualize stored log lines. A typical question might filter ERROR-level messages from one microservice during the last 24 hours. section 4.1.1 section 6.1.2
A practical logging workflow connects the dashboard to the rest of the pipeline:
- A signal source emits container logs through Docker’s Fluentd logging driver. section 4.1.1
- Fluent Bit receives the stream, routes records to OpenSearch, and writes them to an index such as ho11y. section 4.1.1
- Dashboards connects to OpenSearch, where an index pattern and the Discover view expose the resulting records for exploration. section 4.1.1
A local log-search stack
A Docker Compose setup runs OpenSearch as a single node and OpenSearch Dashboards alongside it. The dashboard listens on port 5601, OpenSearch on port 9200, and Fluent Bit sends matching records to the ho11y index. Starting the stack and generating repeated HTTP requests provides records to inspect in Discover.
