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Kibana

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16K
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Sensu

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56
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Kibana vs Sensu: What are the differences?

Developers describe Kibana as "Explore & Visualize Your Data". 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. On the other hand, Sensu is detailed as "Open source monitoring framework". A monitoring framework that aims to be simple, malleable, and scalable. Essentially, Sensu takes the results of “check” scripts run across many systems, and if certain conditions are met; passes their information to one or more “handlers”. Checks are used, for example, to determine if a service like Apache is up or down.

Kibana and Sensu can be categorized as "Monitoring" tools.

Some of the features offered by Kibana are:

  • Flexible analytics and visualization platform
  • Real-time summary and charting of streaming data
  • Intuitive interface for a variety of users

On the other hand, Sensu provides the following key features:

  • Execute service checks
  • Send notifications
  • Collect metrics

"Easy to setup" is the top reason why over 76 developers like Kibana, while over 11 developers mention "Support for almost anything" as the leading cause for choosing Sensu.

Kibana and Sensu are both open source tools. It seems that Kibana with 12.4K GitHub stars and 4.8K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Sensu with 2.96K GitHub stars and 389 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Kibana has a broader approval, being mentioned in 907 company stacks & 479 developers stacks; compared to Sensu, which is listed in 33 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

Advice on Kibana and Sensu
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafana
and
KibanaKibana

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."

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Replies (7)
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana
at

For our Predictive Analytics platform, we have used both Grafana and Kibana

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)
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Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

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

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Bram Verdonck
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana
at

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 .

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Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

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.

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Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

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).

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Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana

I use Grafana because it is without a doubt the best way to visualize metrics

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Povilas Brilius
PHP Web Developer at GroundIn Software · | 0 upvotes · 594.9K views
Recommends
on
KibanaKibana
at

@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.

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Decisions about Kibana and Sensu
Leonardo Henrique da Paixão
Junior QA Tester at SolarMarket · | 15 upvotes · 354.6K views

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.

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Pros of Kibana
Pros of Sensu
  • 88
    Easy to setup
  • 64
    Free
  • 45
    Can search text
  • 21
    Has pie chart
  • 13
    X-axis is not restricted to timestamp
  • 9
    Easy queries and is a good way to view logs
  • 6
    Supports Plugins
  • 4
    Dev Tools
  • 3
    Can build dashboards
  • 3
    More "user-friendly"
  • 2
    Out-of-Box Dashboards/Analytics for Metrics/Heartbeat
  • 2
    Easy to drill-down
  • 1
    Up and running
  • 13
    Support for almost anything
  • 11
    Easy setup
  • 9
    Message routing
  • 7
    Devs can code their own checks
  • 5
    Ease of use
  • 4
    Price
  • 3
    Nagios plugin compatibility
  • 3
    Easy configuration, scales well and performance is good
  • 1
    Written in Go

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Cons of Kibana
Cons of Sensu
  • 6
    Unintuituve
  • 4
    Elasticsearch is huge
  • 3
    Hardweight UI
  • 3
    Works on top of elastic only
  • 1
    Plugins
  • 1
    Written in Go

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What is Kibana?

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.

What is Sensu?

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

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Jobs that mention Kibana and Sensu as a desired skillset
Postman
San Francisco, United States
What companies use Kibana?
What companies use Sensu?
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Blog Posts

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What are some alternatives to Kibana and Sensu?
Datadog
Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
Grafana
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.
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.
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.
Splunk
It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
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