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Checkmk vs Kibana: What are the differences?
Introduction:
This Markdown code provides a comparison between Checkmk and Kibana, highlighting their key differences.
Integration and Purpose: Checkmk is an open-source IT monitoring software that aims to provide comprehensive monitoring of various infrastructure components and services. It is designed to detect and address performance issues and network problems. On the other hand, Kibana is a data visualization tool that works with the Elastic Stack. It focuses on analyzing and visualizing data stored in Elasticsearch.
Data Storage and Management: Checkmk primarily gathers data from target systems and stores it in its own database. It provides a unified interface to access and manage this data for monitoring purposes. In contrast, Kibana relies on Elasticsearch as its primary data storage and management system. It utilizes Elasticsearch's powerful indexing and querying capabilities to handle large volumes of data.
Monitoring Capabilities: Checkmk offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities for various components like servers, networks, applications, and databases. It supports active monitoring through agents installed on target systems, as well as passive monitoring through SNMP and other protocols. Kibana, being a visualization tool, does not provide built-in monitoring capabilities. It relies on data collected by Elasticsearch, which is typically obtained through other monitoring tools or systems.
Alerting and Notification: Checkmk includes a robust alerting system that allows users to define thresholds and rules for triggering notifications. It supports various notification methods like emails, SMS, and integration with external ticketing systems. Kibana, being a data visualization tool, does not include built-in alerting and notification capabilities. Users typically rely on Elasticsearch's alerting features or integrate Kibana with external systems for this functionality.
Visualization and Analysis: Checkmk provides basic visualization and analysis of monitoring data through graphs, charts, and reports within its own interface. However, its primary focus is on monitoring rather than advanced data visualization. Kibana, on the other hand, excels in data visualization and exploration. It offers a wide range of visualization options like bar charts, pie charts, maps, and time series analysis, allowing users to gain deeper insights and perform advanced analytics on their data.
User Interface and Customization: Checkmk provides a user-friendly web-based interface for monitoring and managing systems. It offers customization options like creating dashboards, arranging widgets, and configuring views as per user preferences. Kibana also provides a web-based interface but is more focused on data visualization. It offers extensive customization options to design personalized dashboards, visualizations, and reports, making it highly flexible for different use cases.
In Summary, Checkmk is an IT monitoring software with comprehensive monitoring capabilities and a focus on performance and network issues, while Kibana is a data visualization tool that works with Elasticsearch and excels in data analysis and visualization.
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.
Pros of Checkmk
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
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Cons of Checkmk
Cons of Kibana
- Unintuituve7
- Works on top of elastic only4
- Elasticsearch is huge4
- Hardweight UI3
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