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Kibana vs Sentry: What are the differences?
Kibana: 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; Sentry: Cut time to resolution for app errors from five hours to five minutes. Sentry is an open-source platform for workflow productivity, aggregating errors from across the stack in real time. 500K developers use Sentry to get the code-level context they need to resolve issues at every stage of the app lifecycle.
Kibana belongs to "Monitoring Tools" category of the tech stack, while Sentry can be primarily classified under "Exception Monitoring".
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, Sentry provides the following key features:
- Real-Time Updates: For the first time, developers can fix code-level issues anywhere in the stack well before users even encounter an error.
- Complete Context: Spend more time where it matters, rather than investing in low-impact issues.
- Integrate Everywhere: Drop-in integration for every major platform, framework, and language -- JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Node, Java, .NET, mobile.
"Easy to setup" is the primary reason why developers consider Kibana over the competitors, whereas "Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy" was stated as the key factor in picking Sentry.
Kibana and Sentry are both open source tools. Sentry with 21.4K GitHub stars and 2.45K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Kibana with 12.4K GitHub stars and 4.8K GitHub forks.
Airbnb, Uber Technologies, and Instagram are some of the popular companies that use Sentry, whereas Kibana is used by Airbnb, DigitalOcean, and 9GAG. Sentry has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1341 company stacks & 434 developers stacks; compared to Kibana, which is listed in 907 company stacks and 479 developer stacks.
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.
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.
I essentially inherited a Shopify theme that was originally created by an agency. After discovering a number of errors being thrown in the Dev Console just by scrolling through the website, I needed more visibility over any errors happening in the field. Having used both Sentry and TrackJS, I always got lost in the TrackJS interface, so I felt more comfortable introducing Sentry. The Sentry free tier is also very generous, although it turns out the theme threw over 15k errors in less than a week.
I highly recommend setting up error tracking from day one. Theoretically, you should never need to upgrade from the free tier if you're keeping on top of the errors...
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 logs8
- 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
Pros of Sentry
- Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy236
- Email Notifications121
- Open source108
- Slack integration84
- Github integration71
- Easy49
- User-friendly interface44
- The most important tool we use in production28
- Hipchat integration18
- Heroku Integration17
- Good documentation15
- Free tier14
- Self-hosted11
- Easy setup9
- Realiable7
- Provides context, and great stack trace6
- Love it baby4
- Feedback form on error pages4
- Gitlab integration3
- Filter by custom tags3
- Super user friendly3
- Captures local variables at each frame in backtraces3
- Easy Integration3
- Performance measurements1
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Cons of Kibana
- Unintuituve6
- Elasticsearch is huge4
- Hardweight UI3
- Works on top of elastic only3
Cons of Sentry
- Confusing UI12
- Bundle size4