Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
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 Kibana
- Easy to setup88
- Free64
- 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
- Can build dashboards3
- More "user-friendly"3
- Out-of-Box Dashboards/Analytics for Metrics/Heartbeat2
- Easy to drill-down2
- Up and running1
Pros of Rollbar
- Consolidates similar errors by impact74
- Centralize error management64
- Slack integration63
- Github integration58
- Usage based pricing47
- Insane customer support32
- Instant search23
- Heroku integration21
- Consolidate errors by OS18
- Great Free Plan15
- Trello integration15
- Flexible logging (not just exceptions)13
- Simple yet powerful error tracking tool11
- Multiple Language Support9
- Consolidate errors by browser7
- Easy setup6
- Query errors with RQL6
- Best rails exception handler5
- Deployment tracking is a nice free bonus5
- Awesome service5
- Simple and fast integration5
- Easy setup, friendly ui, demo, lots of integrations4
- Beat your users to the error report3
- Server-side + client-side3
- Errors Analysis3
- Clear and concise information.3
- Powerful3
- Mailgun integration2
- Easy integration with sails.js2
- Bitbucket integration2
- Clear errors on deploy or push1
- Easy Set up familiar UI that doesn't make you look dumb1
- Teams1
- Gitlab integration1
Pros of Sumo Logic
- Search capabilities11
- Live event streaming5
- Pci 3.0 compliant3
- Easy to setup2
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Cons of Kibana
- Unintuituve6
- Elasticsearch is huge4
- Hardweight UI3
- Works on top of elastic only3
Cons of Rollbar
Cons of Sumo Logic
- Expensive2
- Occasionally unreliable log ingestion1
- Missing Monitoring1