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Kibana vs Stackdriver: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Kibana and Stackdriver

  1. Data Source Compatibility: Kibana is designed to work with the Elasticsearch data source, while Stackdriver is primarily focused on monitoring and logging data from Google Cloud Platform services. Kibana provides the flexibility to explore and visualize data from various sources, not limited to a specific platform, whereas Stackdriver is tightly integrated with Google Cloud Platform.

  2. Feature Set: Kibana offers a wide range of data visualization and exploration features, including data filtering, dashboard creation, and time series analysis. It also provides advanced machine learning capabilities for anomaly detection. On the other hand, Stackdriver focuses on monitoring and logging, offering features like real-time metric graphs, log analysis, and alerting.

  3. Ease of Use: Kibana is known for its user-friendly interface, intuitive search capabilities, and interactive visualizations. It provides a flexible query language and a powerful UI for data exploration. Stackdriver, being a managed service, offers simplified setup and configuration for monitoring and logging, but its interface may not be as user-friendly or customizable as Kibana's.

  4. Integration with Third-Party Tools: Kibana has built-in integrations with various third-party tools and data sources, allowing seamless data import/export and integration with existing workflows. Stackdriver, being a Google Cloud Platform service, offers tight integration with other Google Cloud products and services, making it easier to monitor and analyze the data within the platform ecosystem.

  5. Scalability and Performance: Kibana, being a part of the Elasticsearch ecosystem, is designed to handle large volumes of data and scale horizontally. It provides efficient indexing and querying capabilities, making it suitable for big data analytics. Stackdriver, being a managed service, provides automatic scaling and handles the underlying infrastructure, ensuring reliable performance for monitoring and logging.

  6. Community Support and Documentation: Kibana has a vibrant and active open-source community, which contributes to its development and provides extensive documentation, tutorials, and plugins. Stackdriver, being a proprietary Google Cloud service, may have limited community support, and the documentation may be primarily focused on Google Cloud Platform-specific use cases.

In summary, Kibana and Stackdriver differ in terms of their data source compatibility, feature set, ease of use, third-party tool integration, scalability, and community support/documentation. Kibana offers more flexibility and a comprehensive set of data exploration and visualization features, while Stackdriver focuses primarily on monitoring and logging within the Google Cloud Platform ecosystem.

Advice on Kibana and Stackdriver
Needs advice
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GrafanaGrafana
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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
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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
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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 · 623.9K 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 Stackdriver
Leonardo Henrique da Paixão
Junior QA Tester at SolarMarket · | 15 upvotes · 376.5K 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 Stackdriver
  • 88
    Easy to setup
  • 65
    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
    More "user-friendly"
  • 3
    Can build dashboards
  • 2
    Out-of-Box Dashboards/Analytics for Metrics/Heartbeat
  • 2
    Easy to drill-down
  • 1
    Up and running
  • 19
    Monitoring
  • 11
    Logging
  • 8
    Alerting
  • 7
    Tracing
  • 6
    Uptime Monitoring
  • 5
    Error Reporting
  • 4
    Multi-cloud
  • 3
    Production debugger
  • 2
    Many integrations
  • 1
    Backed by Google
  • 1
    Configured basically with GAE

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Cons of Kibana
Cons of Stackdriver
  • 7
    Unintuituve
  • 4
    Works on top of elastic only
  • 4
    Elasticsearch is huge
  • 3
    Hardweight UI
  • 2
    Not free

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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 Stackdriver?

Google Stackdriver provides powerful monitoring, logging, and diagnostics. It equips you with insight into the health, performance, and availability of cloud-powered applications, enabling you to find and fix issues faster.

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What companies use Stackdriver?
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May 21 2019 at 12:20AM

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What are some alternatives to Kibana and Stackdriver?
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.
See all alternatives