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Grafana vs Kibana vs RRDtool: What are the differences?
Key Differences between Grafana, Kibana, and RRDtool
Grafana, Kibana, and RRDtool are powerful open-source tools used for data visualization and monitoring in the field of IT operations. While they share some similarities, there are several key differences that set them apart. Here are the key differences between Grafana, Kibana, and RRDtool:
Data Source Support: Grafana supports a wide range of data sources including databases, cloud storage, and APIs, making it versatile for integrating multiple data sources into visualizations. Kibana, on the other hand, is tightly integrated with Elasticsearch, making it an ideal tool for visualizing and analyzing data stored in Elasticsearch. RRDtool, on the other hand, is primarily designed for collecting, storing, and displaying time-series data.
Data Visualization Features: Grafana provides a rich set of visualization options such as graphs, tables, heatmaps, and single-stat panels. It offers an intuitive and interactive dashboard editor, allowing users to create custom dashboards with ease. Kibana, on the other hand, offers various visualizations including line charts, bar charts, and pie charts. It also provides advanced analytics features like aggregations, filters, and metrics. RRDtool focuses on simple graphing capabilities with support for graph types like line, stacked, and area.
Alerting and Notification: Grafana provides built-in alerting and notification features, allowing users to set up alerts based on predefined conditions and receive notifications via email, Slack, or other channels. Kibana, on the other hand, lacks native alerting capabilities, but it can be integrated with external monitoring systems for alerting purposes. RRDtool does not offer native alerting or notification features.
Community and Ecosystem: Grafana has a large and active community of users, which means there is extensive community support, plugins, and community-built dashboards available. It also has a marketplace for official and third-party plugins. Kibana, being a part of the Elastic Stack, benefits from the ecosystem around Elasticsearch, which includes plugins, integrations, and a strong community. RRDtool has a smaller community compared to Grafana and Kibana but is still widely used for specific time-series graphing needs.
Ease of Use and User Interface: Grafana is known for its user-friendly interface and intuitive dashboard editor, making it easy for users to create and customize dashboards. Kibana also provides a user-friendly interface but can be more complex to set up and configure due to its tight integration with Elasticsearch. RRDtool has a command-line interface and requires system-level configuration, making it less user-friendly compared to Grafana and Kibana.
Supported Operating Systems: Grafana and Kibana provide support for various operating systems including Windows, Linux, and macOS. RRDtool, being a compact and lightweight tool, is compatible with a wide range of operating systems, including Unix-like systems, Windows, and embedded platforms.
In summary, Grafana offers extensive data source support, a rich set of visualization features, and built-in alerting capabilities with a user-friendly interface. Kibana is tightly integrated with Elasticsearch, providing powerful data analysis features but lacks native alerting. RRDtool focuses on time-series graphing with a command-line interface and minimal alerting capabilities.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pros of Grafana
- Beautiful89
- Graphs are interactive68
- Free57
- Easy56
- Nicer than the Graphite web interface34
- Many integrations26
- Can build dashboards18
- Easy to specify time window10
- Can collaborate on dashboards10
- Dashboards contain number tiles9
- Open Source5
- Integration with InfluxDB5
- Click and drag to zoom in5
- Authentification and users management4
- Threshold limits in graphs4
- Alerts3
- It is open to cloud watch and many database3
- Simple and native support to Prometheus3
- Great community support2
- You can use this for development to check memcache2
- You can visualize real time data to put alerts2
- Grapsh as code0
- Plugin visualizationa0
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
Pros of RRDtool
- Do one thing and do it well6
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Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1
Cons of Kibana
- Unintuituve7
- Works on top of elastic only4
- Elasticsearch is huge4
- Hardweight UI3