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Concepts

This page defines key terms used throughout the OpenSearch Dashboards documentation.

OpenSearch Dashboards terminology

  • OpenSearch Dashboards: The web UI for OpenSearch. This is the application you access in your browser.
  • Dashboards application: The application within OpenSearch Dashboards for assembling visualizations into a single page. See Creating dashboards.
  • dashboard (lowercase): An individual page of data visualizations created in the Dashboards application.
  • Visualize application: The application within OpenSearch Dashboards for creating individual charts, maps, and tables. See Creating visualizations in the Visualize application.
  • visualization: A single panel containing a graph, chart, map, or other visual representation of data.
  • Discover application: The application within OpenSearch Dashboards for searching, filtering, and examining data. See Exploring data with Discover.
  • OpenSearch Playground: A read-only, web-based OpenSearch Dashboards instance with preloaded sample data. Use it to explore OpenSearch Dashboards without installing anything.

Data concepts

  • index: A collection of related documents stored in OpenSearch. See Indexes.
  • document: The basic unit of information in OpenSearch, stored as a JSON object. See Documents.
  • index pattern: A view into one or more indexes that you use as a data source in OpenSearch Dashboards. Also called a data source in some contexts. See Index patterns.
  • field: A single named value within a document, equivalent to a column in a relational database table.
  • bucket: A grouping of field values based on an aggregation. Buckets can be categorical (based on text values), range-based (user-defined numeric ranges), histogram-based (automatically sized numeric intervals), or time-based (segments of a timestamp field).
  • aggregation: A computation that summarizes data across documents, such as calculating counts, averages, sums, or grouping documents into buckets. See Aggregations.
  • saved object: Any item you save in OpenSearch Dashboards, including visualizations, dashboards, index patterns, and saved searches.

Workspaces

A workspace is an isolated environment in OpenSearch Dashboards that organizes applications and saved objects by use case (for example, Analytics or Observability). See Workspaces.

Query languages

OpenSearch Dashboards supports several query languages:

  • Dashboards Query Language (DQL): A simple text-based language for filtering data in the Discover and Dashboards search bars.
  • Piped Processing Language (PPL): A pipe-based language for data processing and analysis. Used in the Query Workbench and the visualization editor.
  • Query DSL: The full OpenSearch query language, used in the Dev Tools console and API requests.
  • SQL: Standard SQL syntax for querying OpenSearch data. Used in the Query Workbench.

Next steps

Explore the full documentation for each application:

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