Embed Amazon OpenSearch Service dashboards in your application

Customers across diverse industries rely on Amazon OpenSearch Service for interactive log analytics, real-time application monitoring, website search, vector database, deriving meaningful insights from data, and visualizing these insights using OpenSearch Dashboards. Additionally, customers often seek out capabilities that enable effortless sharing of visual dashboards and seamless embedding of these dashboards within their applications, further enhancing user experience and streamlining workflows.

In this post, we show how to embed a live Amazon Opensearch dashboard in your application, allowing your end customers to access a consolidated, real-time view without ever leaving your website.

Solution overview

We demonstrate how to deploy a sample flight data dashboard using OpenSearch Dashboards and embed it into your application through an iFrame. The following diagram provides a high-level overview of the end-to-end solution.

BDB3004-ArchitectureImage1

The workflow includes the following steps:

The user requests for the embedded dashboard by opening the static web server’s endpoint in a browser.
The request reaches the NGINX endpoint. The NGINX endpoint routes the traffic to the self-managed OpenSearch Dashboards server. The OpenSearch Dashboards server acts as the UI layer that connects to the OpenSearch Service domain as the server.
The self-managed OpenSearch Dashboards server interacts with the Amazon managed OpenSearch Service domain to fetch the required data.
The requested data is sent to the OpenSearch Dashboards server.
The requested data is sent from the self-managed OpenSearch Dashboards server to the web server using the NGINX proxy.
The dashboard renders the visualization with the data and displays it on the website.

Prerequisites

You will launch a self-managed OpenSearch Dashboards server on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance and link it to the managed OpenSearch Service domain to create your visualization. The self-managed OpenSearch Dashboards server acts as the UI layer that connects to the OpenSearch Service domain as the server. The post assumes the presence of a VPC with public as well as private subnets.

Create an OpenSearch Service domain

If you already have an OpenSearch Service domain set up, you can skip this step.

For instructions to create an OpenSearch Service domain, refer to Getting started with Amazon OpenSearch Service. The domain creation takes around 15–20 minutes. When the domain is in Active status, note the domain endpoint, which you will need to set up a proxy in subsequent steps.

Deploy an EC2 instance to act as the NGINX proxy to the OpenSearch Service domain and OpenSearch Dashboards

In this step, you launch an AWS CloudFormation stack that deploys the following resources:

A security group for the EC2 instance
An ingress rule for the security group attached to the OpenSearch Service domain that allows the traffic on port 443 from the proxy instance
An EC2 instance with the NGINX proxy and self-managed OpenSearch Dashboards set up

Complete the following steps to create the stack:

Choose Launch Stack to launch the CloudFormation stack with some preconfigured values in us-east-1. You can change the AWS Region as required.
Provide the parameters for your OpenSearch Service domain.
Choose Create stack.
The process may take 3–4 minutes to complete as it sets up an EC2 instance and the required stack. Wait until the status of the stack changes to CREATE_COMPLETE.
On the Outputs tab of the stack, note the value for DashboardURL.

Access OpenSearch Dashboards using the NGINX proxy and set it up for embedding

In this step, you create a new dashboard in OpenSearch Dashboards, which will be used for embedding. Because you launched the OpenSearch Service domain within the VPC, you don’t have direct access to it. To establish a connection with the domain, you use the NGINX proxy setup that you configured in the previous steps.

Navigate to the link for DashboardURL (as demonstrated in the previous step) in your web browser.
Enter the user name and password you configured while creating the OpenSearch Service domain.

You will use a sample dataset for ease of demonstration, which has some preconfigured visualizations and dashboards.

Import the sample dataset by choosing Add data.

Choose the Sample flight data dataset and choose Add data.

To open the newly imported dashboard and get the iFrame code, choose Embed Code on the Share menu.
Under Generate the link as, select Snapshot and choose Copy iFrame code.

The iFrame code will look similar to the following code:

<iframe src="https://<ec2_instance_elastic_ip>/_dashboards/app/dashboards?security_tenant=global#/view/7adfa750-4c81-11e8-b3d7-01146121b73d?embed=true&_g=(filters%3A!()%2CrefreshInterval%3A(pause%3A!f%2Cvalue%3A900000)%2Ctime%3A(from%3Anow-24h%2Cto%3Anow)) height="600" width="800"></iframe>

Copy the code to your preferred text editor, remove the /_dashboards part, and change the frame height and width from height="600" width="800" to height="800" width="100%".

Wrap the iFrame code with HTML code as shown in the following example and save it as an index.html file on your local system:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
   <head>
      <title>Flight Dashboard</title>
      <style>
         body {
         font-family: Arial;
         margin: 0;
         }
         .header {
         padding: 1px;
         text-align: center;
         font-family: Arial;
         background: black;
         color: white;
         }
         .content {padding:20px;}
      </style>
   </head>
   <body>
      <div class="header">
         <h1>
         Flight Dashboard
         <h1>
      </div>
      <iframe src="https://<ec2_instance_elastic_ip>/app/dashboards#/view/7adfa750-4c81-11e8-b3d7-01146121b73d?embed=true&_g=(filters%3A!()%2CrefreshInterval%3A(pause%3A!f%2Cvalue%3A900000)%2Ctime%3A(from%3Anow-24h%2Cto%3Anow))" height="800" width="100%"></iframe>
   </body>
</html>

Host the HTML code

The next step is to host the index.html file. The index.html file can be served from any local laptop or desktop with Firefox or Chrome browser for a quick test.

There are different options available to host the web server, such as Amazon EC2 or Amazon S3. For instructions to host the web server on Amazon S3, refer to Tutorial: Configuring a static website on Amazon S3.

The following screenshot shows our embedded dashboard.

Clean up

If you no longer need the resources you created, delete the CloudFormation stack and the OpenSearch Service domain (if you created a new one) to prevent incurring additional charges.

Summary

In this post, we showed how you can embed your dashboard created with OpenSearch Dashboards into your application to provide insights to users. If you found this post useful, check out Using OpenSearch Dashboards with Amazon OpenSearch Service and OpenSearch Dashboards quickstart guide.

About the Authors

Vibhu Pareek is a Sr. Solutions Architect at AWS. Since 2016, he has guided customers in cloud adoption using well-architected, repeatable patterns. With his specialization in databases, data analytics, and AI, he thrives on transforming complex challenges into innovative solutions. Outside work, he enjoys short treks and sports like badminton, football, and swimming.

Kamal Manchanda is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, specializing in building and designing data solutions with focus on lake house architectures, data governance, search platforms, log analytics solutions as well as generative AI solutions. In his spare time, Kamal loves to travel and spend time with family.

Adesh Jaiswal is a Cloud Support Engineer in the Support Engineering team at Amazon Web Services. He specializes in Amazon OpenSearch Service. He provides guidance and technical assistance to customers thus enabling them to build scalable, highly available, and secure solutions in the AWS Cloud. In his free time, he enjoys watching movies, TV series, and of course, football.

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