AWS CloudTrail vs Grafana vs Kibana

Get Advice Icon

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

AWS CloudTrail

295
280
+ 1
14
Grafana

18.2K
14.4K
+ 1
415
Kibana

20.6K
16.3K
+ 1
262

AWS CloudTrail vs Grafana vs Kibana: What are the differences?

  1. Data Source: AWS CloudTrail is a service that provides a history of AWS API calls for an AWS account. Grafana and Kibana are visualization tools that allow users to analyze and visualize data from various sources, including logs and databases. While AWS CloudTrail specifically focuses on tracking API call history within AWS, Grafana and Kibana support data from a wider range of sources, making them more versatile in terms of data visualization.

  2. User Interface: AWS CloudTrail offers a simple web interface for viewing API activity logs, while Grafana and Kibana provide more advanced and customizable dashboards and visualizations. Grafana, in particular, is known for its interactive and user-friendly interface that allows users to create dynamic and interactive dashboards that can be tailored to specific needs.

  3. Alerting and Monitoring: AWS CloudTrail does not natively offer alerting and monitoring capabilities, while Grafana and Kibana provide robust alerting features that can notify users of anomalies or specific events in real-time. Grafana has built-in alerting rules and notifications that can be configured based on custom query results, making it a more comprehensive monitoring solution compared to AWS CloudTrail.

  4. Integration: AWS CloudTrail seamlessly integrates with other AWS services, providing a unified solution for tracking API calls within the AWS ecosystem. On the other hand, Grafana and Kibana support integration with a wide range of data sources, including databases like Elasticsearch and InfluxDB, allowing users to centralize and visualize data from multiple sources in a single platform.

  5. Customization: While AWS CloudTrail provides a standardized logging solution for AWS API activity, Grafana and Kibana offer extensive customization options for creating personalized dashboards and visualizations. Users can customize the appearance, layout, and data sources in Grafana and Kibana to suit their specific requirements, making them more flexible tools for data analysis and visualization.

  6. Data Retention: AWS CloudTrail has a limited data retention period for API logs, typically around 90 days. Grafana and Kibana, on the other hand, allow users to store and retain data for longer periods, providing historical insights and trend analysis over time. This extended data retention capability makes Grafana and Kibana more suitable for long-term data analysis and reporting compared to AWS CloudTrail.

In Summary, AWS CloudTrail is focused on tracking API calls within the AWS ecosystem with limited customization and data retention capabilities, while Grafana and Kibana offer more versatile data visualization tools with advanced customization, alerting, and integration options for a wider range of data sources.

Advice on AWS CloudTrail, Grafana, and Kibana
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 848.4K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

See more
Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 634K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.

See more
Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 775.4K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.

See more
Replies (2)
Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/

See more
Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.

See more
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."

See more
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)
See more
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

See more
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 .

See more
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.

See more
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).

See more
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana

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

See more
Povilas Brilius
PHP Web Developer at GroundIn Software · | 0 upvotes · 644.7K 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.

See more
Decisions about AWS CloudTrail, Grafana, and Kibana
Leonardo Henrique da Paixão
Pleno QA Enginneer at SolarMarket · | 2 upvotes · 195.7K views

I learned a lot from Grafana, especially the issue of data monitoring, as it is easy to use, I learned how to create quick and simple dashboards. InfluxDB, I didn't know any other types of DBMS, I only knew about relational DBMS or not, but the difference was the scalability of both, but with influxDB, I knew how a time series DBMS works and finally, Telegraf, which is from the same company as InfluxDB, as I used the Windows Operating System, Telegraf tools was the first in the industry, in addition, it has complete documentation, facilitating its use, I learned a lot about connections, without having to make scripts to collect the data.

See more
Leonardo Henrique da Paixão
Pleno QA Enginneer at SolarMarket · | 15 upvotes · 391.6K 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.

See more
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn More
Pros of AWS CloudTrail
Pros of Grafana
Pros of Kibana
  • 7
    Very easy setup
  • 3
    Good integrations with 3rd party tools
  • 2
    Very powerful
  • 2
    Backup to S3
  • 89
    Beautiful
  • 68
    Graphs are interactive
  • 57
    Free
  • 56
    Easy
  • 34
    Nicer than the Graphite web interface
  • 26
    Many integrations
  • 18
    Can build dashboards
  • 10
    Easy to specify time window
  • 10
    Can collaborate on dashboards
  • 9
    Dashboards contain number tiles
  • 5
    Open Source
  • 5
    Integration with InfluxDB
  • 5
    Click and drag to zoom in
  • 4
    Authentification and users management
  • 4
    Threshold limits in graphs
  • 3
    Alerts
  • 3
    It is open to cloud watch and many database
  • 3
    Simple and native support to Prometheus
  • 2
    Great community support
  • 2
    You can use this for development to check memcache
  • 2
    You can visualize real time data to put alerts
  • 0
    Grapsh as code
  • 0
    Plugin visualizationa
  • 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

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of AWS CloudTrail
Cons of Grafana
Cons of Kibana
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 1
      No interactive query builder
    • 7
      Unintuituve
    • 4
      Works on top of elastic only
    • 4
      Elasticsearch is huge
    • 3
      Hardweight UI

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    85
    3
    483
    5.9K
    1.1K
    260
    6.4K
    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is AWS CloudTrail?

    With CloudTrail, you can get a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as AWS CloudFormation). The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.

    What is 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.

    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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    Jobs that mention AWS CloudTrail, Grafana, and Kibana as a desired skillset
    Postman
    San Francisco, United States
    What companies use AWS CloudTrail?
    What companies use Grafana?
    What companies use Kibana?

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with AWS CloudTrail?
    What tools integrate with Grafana?
    What tools integrate with Kibana?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    Blog Posts

    May 21 2020 at 12:02AM

    Rancher Labs

    KubernetesAmazon EC2Grafana+12
    5
    1559
    May 21 2019 at 12:20AM

    Elastic

    ElasticsearchKibanaLogstash+4
    12
    5342
    Jun 26 2018 at 3:26AM

    Twilio SendGrid

    GitHubDockerKafka+10
    11
    10076
    JavaScriptGitHubNode.js+29
    14
    13704
    GitHubPythonReact+42
    49
    41056
    GitGitHubPython+22
    17
    14332
    What are some alternatives to AWS CloudTrail, Grafana, and Kibana?
    AWS Config
    AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. With AWS Config you can discover existing AWS resources, export a complete inventory of your AWS resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.
    AWS X-Ray
    It helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With this, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. It provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components.
    Splunk
    It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
    New Relic
    The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.
    Sentry
    Sentry’s Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health.
    See all alternatives