Kibana vs Apache Zeppelin

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Kibana

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261
Apache Zeppelin

188
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Apache Zeppelin vs Kibana: What are the differences?

Introduction: In this comparison, we will highlight the key differences between Apache Zeppelin and Kibana.

  1. Purpose: Apache Zeppelin is a web-based notebook that enables data-driven, interactive and collaborative data analytics while Kibana is primarily used for visualization of data stored in Elasticsearch. Zeppelin offers greater interactivity and collaboration features, while Kibana is focused on data visualization within the Elasticsearch ecosystem.

  2. Supported Data Sources: Apache Zeppelin supports a variety of different data sources including Apache Spark, Hive, JDBC, and many others, making it a versatile tool for data analysis. On the other hand, Kibana is specifically designed to work with data stored in Elasticsearch, limiting its data source options to Elasticsearch indices.

  3. Functionality: Apache Zeppelin provides a wide range of functionalities such as data visualization, collaboration, integration with multiple interpreters, and flexible integration with various data sources. Kibana, on the other hand, is more specialized in data visualization and exploration within Elasticsearch, offering features like dashboard creation, search, and filtering capabilities.

  4. Ease of Use: Apache Zeppelin is known for its user-friendly interface, interactive environment, and support for multiple programming languages, making it easy for users to perform data analysis tasks. Kibana, while powerful in data visualization, may have a steeper learning curve for users who are not familiar with Elasticsearch query language or data visualization concepts.

  5. Scalability: Apache Zeppelin is designed to scale horizontally and vertically, supporting distributed computation frameworks like Apache Spark, allowing users to handle large datasets and complex analytics tasks efficiently. Kibana, on the other hand, may face limitations in scalability as it is primarily focused on visualization and exploration of data within Elasticsearch indices.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Apache Zeppelin has a vibrant open-source community and supports a wide range of interpreters and integrations, allowing users to customize and extend its functionality. Kibana, being part of the Elasticsearch ecosystem, benefits from a strong community of Elasticsearch users and developers, with a focus on integrating with other Elastic products like Logstash and Beats.

In Summary, Apache Zeppelin and Kibana have key differences in their purposes, supported data sources, functionality, ease of use, scalability, and community/ecosystem support, making them suitable for different use cases in data analytics and visualization.

Advice on Kibana and Apache Zeppelin
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 · 595.8K 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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Pros of Kibana
Pros of Apache Zeppelin
  • 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
  • 7
    In-line code execution using paragraphs
  • 5
    Cluster integration
  • 4
    Multi-User Capability
  • 4
    In-line graphing
  • 4
    Zeppelin context to exchange data between languages
  • 2
    Privacy configuration of the end users
  • 2
    Execution progress included
  • 2
    Multi-user with kerberos
  • 2
    Allows to close browser and reopen for result later

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Cons of Kibana
Cons of Apache Zeppelin
  • 6
    Unintuituve
  • 4
    Elasticsearch is huge
  • 3
    Hardweight UI
  • 3
    Works on top of elastic only
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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 Apache Zeppelin?

    A web-based notebook that enables interactive data analytics. You can make beautiful data-driven, interactive and collaborative documents with SQL, Scala and more.

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    Blog Posts

    May 21 2019 at 12:20AM

    Elastic

    ElasticsearchKibanaLogstash+4
    12
    5166
    GitHubPythonReact+42
    49
    40728
    GitHubGitPython+22
    17
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    GitHubMySQLSlack+44
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    What are some alternatives to Kibana and Apache Zeppelin?
    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