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Kibana vs Sentry: What are the differences?
Kibana and Sentry are both popular tools used for monitoring and analyzing software logs and errors. Here are the key differences between the two.
Integration Capabilities: Kibana is a part of the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) and is specifically designed to work with Elasticsearch. It provides a wide range of integration options with various systems and data sources. In contrast, Sentry is a standalone error monitoring platform that can integrate with different programming languages and frameworks.
Real-time Monitoring vs. Exception Tracking: Kibana is primarily focused on real-time monitoring and log analysis. It enables users to visualize and analyze log data in real time, making it ideal for monitoring system performance and detecting anomalies. On the other hand, Sentry is mainly used for exception tracking and error reporting. It captures and aggregates application errors, providing detailed information about the root causes and allowing developers to fix them efficiently.
Search and Query Capabilities: Kibana offers advanced search and query capabilities due to its integration with Elasticsearch. Users can perform complex queries, filter data, and create dashboards and visualizations based on the data stored in Elasticsearch. Sentry, though it provides some search capabilities, is more focused on providing detailed error information and stack traces rather than broader search functionality.
Alerting and Notification: Kibana provides flexible alerting and notification options, allowing users to define conditions and thresholds for triggering alerts based on specific log events or metrics. It can send notifications via various channels like email, Slack, or PagerDuty. On the other hand, Sentry offers a comprehensive email notification system but provides limited options for defining custom alerts and integrating with external notification services.
Data Retention and Scalability: Kibana, being a part of the ELK stack, can handle large volumes of data by leveraging the scalability and distributed nature of Elasticsearch. It allows users to configure data retention policies, balancing storage requirements with historical data analysis needs. Sentry, on the other hand, has a defined retention policy and offers storage options based on the selected plan. It includes a set retention period for error data and provides automatic data pruning after that period.
In summary, Kibana is an integration-focused tool designed for real-time log analysis, with strong search capabilities and flexible alerting options. On the other hand, Sentry is a specialized exception tracking platform that provides detailed error information, stack traces, and notifications but with limited custom alerting and search functionality.
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
- 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
Pros of Sentry
- Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy237
- 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
- Feedback form on error pages4
- Love it baby4
- 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
- Unintuituve7
- Works on top of elastic only4
- Elasticsearch is huge4
- Hardweight UI3
Cons of Sentry
- Confusing UI12
- Bundle size4