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Airbrake vs Kibana: What are the differences?
Airbrake and Kibana are two popular tools used in software development for monitoring and analyzing application performance. Below are some key differences between Airbrake and Kibana.
Purpose: Airbrake is primarily an error monitoring and tracking tool that captures errors and exceptions in real-time from web applications, while Kibana is a data visualization tool used to analyze and visualize log data and metrics collected from various sources, including applications, servers, and systems.
Integration: Airbrake integrates seamlessly with multiple programming languages and frameworks, providing detailed error reports and notifications to developers and teams. In contrast, Kibana is often used in conjunction with Elasticsearch to analyze and explore data stored in Elasticsearch indices, making it more focused on log analysis and data visualization.
Alerting Capabilities: Airbrake offers robust alerting capabilities, allowing users to set up notifications for specific error patterns or thresholds, ensuring that critical issues are addressed promptly. Kibana, on the other hand, does not have built-in alerting features and relies on third-party plugins or integrations for creating alerts based on data analysis.
User Interface: Airbrake provides a user-friendly interface with detailed error insights, including stack traces, affected users, and frequency of occurrences, making it easier for developers to identify and troubleshoot issues quickly. In comparison, Kibana offers a customizable dashboard interface with powerful visualization options, enabling users to create interactive charts, graphs, and maps to explore and analyze data effectively.
Scalability: Airbrake is well-suited for small to medium-sized teams and applications due to its focus on error monitoring and tracking, whereas Kibana is designed to handle large volumes of data and is scalable for enterprise-level deployments, providing advanced data analytics and visualization capabilities for extensive log analysis and monitoring.
In Summary, Airbrake is tailored for error monitoring and tracking, with strong alerting capabilities and a user-friendly interface, while Kibana is more focused on data visualization and analysis, suitable for large-scale deployments with advanced customization options.
From a StackShare Community member: “We need better analytics & insights into our Elasticsearch cluster. Grafana, which ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch, looks great but isn’t officially supported/endorsed by Elastic. Kibana, on the other hand, is made and supported by Elastic. I’m wondering what people suggest in this situation."
For our Predictive Analytics platform, we have used both Grafana and Kibana
- Grafana based demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdTB2AcU4Sg
- Kibana based reporting screenshot: https://imgur.com/vuVvZKN
Kibana has predictions
and ML algorithms support, so if you need them, you may be better off with Kibana . The multi-variate analysis features it provide are very unique (not available in Grafana).
For everything else, definitely Grafana . Especially the number of supported data sources, and plugins clearly makes Grafana a winner (in just visualization and reporting sense). Creating your own plugin is also very easy. The top pros of Grafana (which it does better than Kibana ) are:
- Creating and organizing visualization panels
- Templating the panels on dashboards for repetetive tasks
- Realtime monitoring, filtering of charts based on conditions and variables
- Export / Import in JSON format (that allows you to version and save your dashboard as part of git)
I use both Kibana and Grafana on my workplace: Kibana for logging and Grafana for monitoring. Since you already work with Elasticsearch, I think Kibana is the safest choice in terms of ease of use and variety of messages it can manage, while Grafana has still (in my opinion) a strong link to metrics
After looking for a way to monitor or at least get a better overview of our infrastructure, we found out that Grafana (which I previously only used in ELK stacks) has a plugin available to fully integrate with Amazon CloudWatch . Which makes it way better for our use-case than the offer of the different competitors (most of them are even paid). There is also a CloudFlare plugin available, the platform we use to serve our DNS requests. Although we are a big fan of https://smashing.github.io/ (previously dashing), for now we are starting with Grafana .
I use Kibana because it ships with the ELK stack. I don't find it as powerful as Splunk however it is light years above grepping through log files. We previously used Grafana but found it to be annoying to maintain a separate tool outside of the ELK stack. We were able to get everything we needed from Kibana.
Kibana should be sufficient in this architecture for decent analytics, if stronger metrics is needed then combine with Grafana. Datadog also offers nice overview but there's no need for it in this case unless you need more monitoring and alerting (and more technicalities).
@Kibana, of course, because @Grafana looks like amateur sort of solution, crammed with query builder grouping aggregates, but in essence, as recommended by CERN - KIbana is the corporate (startup vectored) decision.
Furthermore, @Kibana comes with complexity adhering ELK stack, whereas @InfluxDB + @Grafana & co. recently have become sophisticated development conglomerate instead of advancing towards a understandable installation step by step inheritance.
Pros of Airbrake
- Reliable28
- Consolidates similar errors25
- Easy setup22
- Slack Integration15
- Github Integration10
- Email notifications7
- Includes a free plan6
- Android Application to view errors.5
- Search and filtering4
- Shows request parameters4
- Heroku integration2
Pros of Kibana
- Easy to setup88
- Free65
- Can search text45
- Has pie chart21
- X-axis is not restricted to timestamp13
- Easy queries and is a good way to view logs9
- Supports Plugins6
- Dev Tools4
- More "user-friendly"3
- Can build dashboards3
- Out-of-Box Dashboards/Analytics for Metrics/Heartbeat2
- Easy to drill-down2
- Up and running1
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Cons of Airbrake
- Rejects error report if non-latin characters exists0
Cons of Kibana
- Unintuituve7
- Works on top of elastic only4
- Elasticsearch is huge4
- Hardweight UI3