---
title: Building Your Own Beat Dashboards
description: Before building your own dashboards or customizing the existing ones, you need to load: the Beat index pattern, which specifies how Kibana should display...
url: https://www.elastic.co/docs/extend/beats/build-dashboards
---

# Building Your Own Beat Dashboards

<note>
  If you want to modify a dashboard that comes with a Beat, it’s better to modify a copy of the dashboard because the Beat overwrites the dashboards during the setup phase in order to have the latest version. For duplicating a dashboard, just use the `Clone` button from the top of the page.
</note>

Before building your own dashboards or customizing the existing ones, you need to load:
- the Beat index pattern, which specifies how Kibana should display the Beat fields
- the Beat dashboards that you want to customize

For the Elastic Beats, the index pattern is available in the Beat package under `kibana/*/index-pattern`. The index-pattern is automatically generated from the `fields.yml` file, available in the Beat package. For more details check the [generate index pattern](https://www.elastic.co/docs/extend/beats/generate-index-pattern) section.
All Beats dashboards, visualizations and saved searches must follow common naming conventions:
- Dashboard names have prefix `[BeatName Module]`, e.g. `[Filebeat Nginx] Access logs`
- Visualizations and searches have suffix `[BeatName Module]`, e.g. `Top processes [Filebeat Nginx]`

<note>
  You can set a custom name (skip suffix) for visualization placed on a dashboard. The original visualization will stay intact.
</note>

The naming convention rules can be verified with the the tool `mage check`. The command fails if it detects:
- empty description on a dashboard
- unexpected dashboard title format (missing prefix `[BeatName ModuleName]`)
- unexpected visualization title format (missing suffix `[BeatName Module]`)

After creating your own dashboards in Kibana, you can [export the Kibana dashboards](https://www.elastic.co/docs/extend/beats/export-dashboards) to a local directory, and then [archive the dashboards](https://www.elastic.co/docs/extend/beats/archive-dashboards) in order to be able to share the dashboards with the community.