Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana

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Grafana

17.8K
14.2K
+ 1
415
Graphite

390
420
+ 1
42
Kibana

20.4K
16.2K
+ 1
262

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana: What are the differences?

Introduction

Grafana, Graphite, and Kibana are popular open-source tools used for monitoring and visualizing data. While they serve similar purposes, there are significant differences between them.

  1. Storage and Data Source: Grafana is a standalone monitoring tool that can integrate with different data sources, such as Graphite, Prometheus, and Elasticsearch. Graphite, on the other hand, is a time-series database that is primarily used for storing and querying numeric time-series data. Kibana is part of the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) and is primarily used for analyzing log data stored in Elasticsearch.

  2. Visualizations and Dashboards: Grafana provides a rich set of options for creating dynamic and interactive visualizations, including graphs, tables, heatmaps, and gauges. It allows users to build customizable dashboards by dragging and dropping different visual elements. Graphite, on the other hand, is more focused on graphing and charting, providing a simple interface for plotting time-series data. Kibana specializes in log data analysis and provides specific visualizations for log-based analytics, such as histograms, maps, and tag clouds.

  3. Alerting and Notifications: Grafana has built-in alerting capabilities that allow users to set up rules based on metrics and receive notifications via various channels like email, Slack, or PagerDuty. Graphite, being primarily a database, does not have native alerting features. However, third-party tools can be used to set up alerts based on Graphite metrics. Kibana offers basic alerting capabilities through its Watcher feature, which can monitor Elasticsearch data and trigger actions based on predefined conditions.

  4. Community and Ecosystem: Grafana has a large and active community, supported by a rich ecosystem of plugins and integrations. It has extensive documentation and a wide range of online resources, making it easy to find help and resources. Graphite also has an active community, but it may not have as many plugins and integrations available as Grafana. Kibana benefits from being part of the ELK stack, which has a significant user base and a range of community-driven plugins and resources.

  5. Ease of Use: Grafana is known for its user-friendly and intuitive interface, making it easy for both beginners and advanced users to create dashboards and visualizations. It has a robust query editor and provides autocomplete suggestions. Graphite has a simpler interface focused on graphing, but it may require more technical expertise to set up and configure. Kibana has a relatively steep learning curve, especially for users without prior experience with Elasticsearch and the ELK stack.

  6. Supported Use Cases: Grafana is widely used for monitoring and visualization in various domains, including infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, and business intelligence. It is versatile and can integrate with multiple data sources, making it suitable for different use cases. Graphite is mainly used for time-series data storage and graphing, making it suitable for scenarios where historical trend analysis is critical. Kibana is primarily used for log analysis and enables users to search, analyze, and visualize log data in real-time.

In summary, Grafana is a versatile monitoring and visualization tool with a user-friendly interface, supporting various data sources and use cases. Graphite is focused on time-series data storage and graphing, while Kibana specializes in log analysis within the ELK stack environment.

Advice on Grafana, Graphite, and Kibana
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 822.1K 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.

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Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 607.5K 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.

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Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 750.2K 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.

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Replies (2)
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.

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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/

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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 · 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 Grafana, Graphite, and Kibana
Matt Menzenski
Senior Software Engineering Manager at PayIt · | 16 upvotes · 1M views

Grafana and Prometheus together, running on Kubernetes , is a powerful combination. These tools are cloud-native and offer a large community and easy integrations. At PayIt we're using exporting Java application metrics using a Dropwizard metrics exporter, and our Node.js services now use the prom-client npm library to serve metrics.

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Leonardo Henrique da Paixão
Junior QA Tester at SolarMarket · | 2 upvotes · 187K 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.

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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 Grafana
Pros of Graphite
Pros of Kibana
  • 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
  • 16
    Render any graph
  • 9
    Great functions to apply on timeseries
  • 8
    Well supported integrations
  • 6
    Includes event tracking
  • 3
    Rolling aggregation makes storage managable
  • 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

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Cons of Grafana
Cons of Graphite
Cons of Kibana
  • 1
    No interactive query builder
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 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

    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 Graphite?

    Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

    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 Grafana, Graphite, and Kibana as a desired skillset
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    San Francisco, United States

    Why do developers choose Kibana vs Grafana vs Graphite?

    • Grafana is a general purpose dashboard tool that integrates with many data sources, including Graphite, InfluxDB, and OpenTSDB. Fans of Grafana call it beautiful and easy to use, and love its many integrations.
    • Kibana is loved by fans of Elasticsearch; as part of the Elastic Stack it integrates seamlessly with other Elastic products. Fans also cite its ease of setup, pie chart capability, and user-friendliness as pros.
    • Fans of Graphite appreciate its storage functions, integrations (including Grafana), and ability to render any graph.
    What companies use Grafana?
    What companies use Graphite?
    What companies use Kibana?

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    What tools integrate with Grafana?
    What tools integrate with Graphite?
    What tools integrate with Kibana?

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    What are some alternatives to Grafana, Graphite, and Kibana?
    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!
    Prometheus
    Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.
    Splunk
    It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
    Netdata
    Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps
    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.
    See all alternatives