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Bosun

18
52
+ 1
3
Kibana

20.1K
16K
+ 1
261
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Bosun vs Kibana: What are the differences?

Bosun: Open-source monitoring and alerting system by Stack Exchange. Bosun is an open-source, MIT licensed, monitoring and alerting system by Stack Exchange. It has an expressive domain specific language for evaluating alerts and creating detailed notifications. It also lets you test your alerts against history for a faster development experience; Kibana: Explore & Visualize Your Data. 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.

Bosun and Kibana can be categorized as "Monitoring" tools.

Some of the features offered by Bosun are:

  • Save time by testing alerting against historical data and reduce alert noise before an alert goes into production
  • Supports querying OpenTSDB, Graphite, and Logstash-Elasticsearch
  • Create notifications using Bosun's template language: include graphs, tables, and contextual information

On the other hand, Kibana provides the following key features:

  • Flexible analytics and visualization platform
  • Real-time summary and charting of streaming data
  • Intuitive interface for a variety of users

Bosun and Kibana are both open source tools. It seems that Kibana with 12.4K GitHub stars and 4.8K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Bosun with 2.84K GitHub stars and 477 GitHub forks.

Advice on Bosun and Kibana
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
Founder at CloudvCard · | 5 upvotes · 641K views
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 · 596.7K 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.

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Decisions about Bosun and Kibana
Leonardo Henrique da PaixĂŁo
Junior QA Tester at SolarMarket · | 15 upvotes · 356K 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 Bosun
Pros of Kibana
  • 1
    Powerful alerting
  • 1
    Query multiple tsdbs
  • 1
    Query Elasticsearch
  • 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

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Bosun
Cons of Kibana
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 6
      Unintuituve
    • 4
      Elasticsearch is huge
    • 3
      Hardweight UI
    • 3
      Works on top of elastic only

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Bosun?

    Bosun is an open-source, MIT licensed, monitoring and alerting system by Stack Exchange. It has an expressive domain specific language for evaluating alerts and creating detailed notifications. It also lets you test your alerts against history for a faster development experience.

    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 Bosun and Kibana as a desired skillset
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    San Francisco, United States
    What companies use Bosun?
    What companies use Kibana?
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    What tools integrate with Bosun?
    What tools integrate with Kibana?
      No integrations found

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      Blog Posts

      May 21 2019 at 12:20AM

      Elastic

      ElasticsearchKibanaLogstash+4
      12
      5165
      GitHubPythonReact+42
      49
      40727
      GitHubGitPython+22
      17
      14209
      GitHubMySQLSlack+44
      109
      50665
      What are some alternatives to Bosun and Kibana?
      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.
      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.
      Nagios
      Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.
      Zabbix
      Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.
      OpenCensus
      It is a set of libraries for various languages that allow you to collect application metrics and distributed traces, then transfer the data to a backend of your choice in real time. This data can be analyzed by developers and admins to understand the health of the application and debug problems.
      See all alternatives