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  5. AWS CloudTrail vs Grafana vs Kibana

AWS CloudTrail vs Grafana vs Kibana

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
Stacks304
Followers280
Votes14
Kibana
Kibana
Stacks20.6K
Followers16.4K
Votes262
GitHub Stars20.8K
Forks8.5K
Grafana
Grafana
Stacks18.4K
Followers14.6K
Votes415
GitHub Stars70.7K
Forks13.1K

AWS CloudTrail vs Grafana vs Kibana: What are the differences?

  1. Data Source: AWS CloudTrail is a service that provides a history of AWS API calls for an AWS account. Grafana and Kibana are visualization tools that allow users to analyze and visualize data from various sources, including logs and databases. While AWS CloudTrail specifically focuses on tracking API call history within AWS, Grafana and Kibana support data from a wider range of sources, making them more versatile in terms of data visualization.

  2. User Interface: AWS CloudTrail offers a simple web interface for viewing API activity logs, while Grafana and Kibana provide more advanced and customizable dashboards and visualizations. Grafana, in particular, is known for its interactive and user-friendly interface that allows users to create dynamic and interactive dashboards that can be tailored to specific needs.

  3. Alerting and Monitoring: AWS CloudTrail does not natively offer alerting and monitoring capabilities, while Grafana and Kibana provide robust alerting features that can notify users of anomalies or specific events in real-time. Grafana has built-in alerting rules and notifications that can be configured based on custom query results, making it a more comprehensive monitoring solution compared to AWS CloudTrail.

  4. Integration: AWS CloudTrail seamlessly integrates with other AWS services, providing a unified solution for tracking API calls within the AWS ecosystem. On the other hand, Grafana and Kibana support integration with a wide range of data sources, including databases like Elasticsearch and InfluxDB, allowing users to centralize and visualize data from multiple sources in a single platform.

  5. Customization: While AWS CloudTrail provides a standardized logging solution for AWS API activity, Grafana and Kibana offer extensive customization options for creating personalized dashboards and visualizations. Users can customize the appearance, layout, and data sources in Grafana and Kibana to suit their specific requirements, making them more flexible tools for data analysis and visualization.

  6. Data Retention: AWS CloudTrail has a limited data retention period for API logs, typically around 90 days. Grafana and Kibana, on the other hand, allow users to store and retain data for longer periods, providing historical insights and trend analysis over time. This extended data retention capability makes Grafana and Kibana more suitable for long-term data analysis and reporting compared to AWS CloudTrail.

In Summary, AWS CloudTrail is focused on tracking API calls within the AWS ecosystem with limited customization and data retention capabilities, while Grafana and Kibana offer more versatile data visualization tools with advanced customization, alerting, and integration options for a wider range of data sources.

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Advice on AWS CloudTrail, Kibana, Grafana

Leonardo Henrique da
Leonardo Henrique da

Pleno QA Enginneer at SolarMarket

Dec 8, 2020

Decided

The objective of this work was to develop a system to monitor the materials of a production line using IoT technology. Currently, the process of monitoring and replacing parts depends on manual services. For this, load cells, microcontroller, Broker MQTT, Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana were used. It was implemented in a workflow that had the function of collecting sensor data, storing it in a database, and visualizing it in the form of weight and quantity. With these developed solutions, he hopes to contribute to the logistics area, in the replacement and control of materials.

403k views403k
Comments
matteo1989it
matteo1989it

Jun 26, 2019

ReviewonKibanaKibanaGrafanaGrafanaElasticsearchElasticsearch

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

757k views757k
Comments
StackShare
StackShare

Jun 25, 2019

Needs advice

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."

663k views663k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
Kibana
Kibana
Grafana
Grafana

With CloudTrail, you can get a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as AWS CloudFormation). The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

Increased Visibility- CloudTrail provides increased visibility into your user activity by recording AWS API calls. You can answer questions such as, what actions did a given user take over a given time period? For a given resource, which user has taken actions on it over a given time period? What is the source IP address of a given activity? Which activities failed due to inadequate permissions?;Durable and Inexpensive Log File Storage- CloudTrail uses Amazon S3 for log file storage and delivery, so log files are stored durably and inexpensively. You can use Amazon S3 lifecycle configuration rules to further reduce storage costs. For example, you can define rules to automatically delete old log files or archive them to Amazon Glacier for additional savings.;Easy Administration- CloudTrail is a fully managed service; you simply turn on CloudTrail for your account using the AWS Management Console, the Command Line Interface, or the CloudTrail SDK and start receiving CloudTrail log files in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket that you specify.;Reliable- CloudTrail continuously transports events from AWS services using a highly available and fault tolerant processing pipeline.;Timely Delivery- CloudTrail typically delivers events within 15 minutes of the API call.;Log File Aggregation- CloudTrail can be configured to aggregate log files across multiple accounts and regions so that log files are delivered to a single bucket. Please refer to the of the AWS CloudTrail User Guide for detailed instructions.;Notifications for Log File Delivery- CloudTrail can be configured to publish a notification for each log file delivered, thus enabling you to automatically take action upon log file delivery. CloudTrail uses the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for notifications.;Choice of Partner Solutions- Multiple partners including AlertLogic, Boundary, Loggly, Splunk and Sumologic offer integrated solutions to analyze CloudTrail log files. These solutions include features like change tracking, troubleshooting, and security analysis.
Flexible analytics and visualization platform;Real-time summary and charting of streaming data;Intuitive interface for a variety of users;Instant sharing and embedding of dashboards
Create, edit, save & search dashboards;Change column spans and row heights;Drag and drop panels to rearrange;Use InfluxDB or Elasticsearch as dashboard storage;Import & export dashboard (json file);Import dashboard from Graphite;Templating
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
20.8K
GitHub Stars
70.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
8.5K
GitHub Forks
13.1K
Stacks
304
Stacks
20.6K
Stacks
18.4K
Followers
280
Followers
16.4K
Followers
14.6K
Votes
14
Votes
262
Votes
415
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 7
    Very easy setup
  • 3
    Good integrations with 3rd party tools
  • 2
    Backup to S3
  • 2
    Very powerful
Pros
  • 88
    Easy to setup
  • 65
    Free
  • 45
    Can search text
  • 21
    Has pie chart
  • 13
    X-axis is not restricted to timestamp
Cons
  • 7
    Unintuituve
  • 4
    Elasticsearch is huge
  • 4
    Works on top of elastic only
  • 3
    Hardweight UI
Pros
  • 89
    Beautiful
  • 68
    Graphs are interactive
  • 57
    Free
  • 56
    Easy
  • 34
    Nicer than the Graphite web interface
Cons
  • 1
    No interactive query builder
Integrations
Boundary
Boundary
Loggly
Loggly
Splunk Cloud
Splunk Cloud
Logstash
Logstash
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch
Beats
Beats
Graphite
Graphite
InfluxDB
InfluxDB

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudTrail, Kibana, Grafana?

Papertrail

Papertrail

Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.

Prometheus

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Logmatic

Logmatic

Get a clear overview of what is happening across your distributed environments, and spot the needle in the haystack in no time. Build dynamic analyses and identify improvements for your software, your user experience and your business.

Loggly

Loggly

It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.

Logentries

Logentries

Logentries makes machine-generated log data easily accessible to IT operations, development, and business analysis teams of all sizes. With the broadest platform support and an open API, Logentries brings the value of log-level data to any system, to any team member, and to a community of more than 25,000 worldwide users.

Logstash

Logstash

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.

Nagios

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Graylog

Graylog

Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.

Zabbix

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

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