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Kamon vs Kibana: What are the differences?
Introduction: Kamon and Kibana are both tools used for monitoring and analyzing applications, but they have key differences that set them apart.
Data Visualization: Kamon focuses on real-time metrics and tends to be more lightweight in terms of data visualization compared to Kibana, which provides a more robust and visually appealing data visualization platform with interactive charts, graphs, and dashboards.
Data Aggregation: Kibana offers advanced data aggregation capabilities, allowing users to aggregate, filter, and analyze data from various sources with ease. On the other hand, Kamon provides basic data aggregation features without the advanced capabilities found in Kibana.
Integration: Kibana integrates seamlessly with Elasticsearch, providing users with a powerful monitoring and analysis solution within the Elastic Stack. In contrast, Kamon can be integrated with various data stores but may require additional configuration and setup compared to the seamless integration offered by Kibana.
Community Support: Kibana has a larger and more active community, providing users with a wealth of resources, plugins, and support compared to Kamon, which may have a smaller community and limited resources available for users.
Alerting and Monitoring: Kibana offers robust alerting and monitoring features, allowing users to set up custom alerts based on specific criteria and monitor system health in real time. Kamon, while capable of basic monitoring, may lack the advanced alerting capabilities found in Kibana.
Ease of Use: Kibana is known for its user-friendly interface and intuitive design, making it easy for users to navigate and use its features. Kamon, while functional, may not offer the same level of ease of use and may require a steeper learning curve for users.
In Summary, Kamon and Kibana differ in data visualization, data aggregation, integration, community support, alerting and monitoring, and ease of use, making them suitable for different monitoring and analysis needs.
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 Kamon
- Affordable for small teams or startups1
- Generous free plan (up to 5 services, no time limit)1
- Easy set-up1
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 Kamon
Cons of Kibana
- Unintuituve7
- Works on top of elastic only4
- Elasticsearch is huge4
- Hardweight UI3