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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Monitoring Tools
  5. Kibana vs M3

Kibana vs M3

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Kibana
Kibana
Stacks20.6K
Followers16.4K
Votes262
GitHub Stars20.8K
Forks8.5K
M3
M3
Stacks12
Followers61
Votes0
GitHub Stars4.9K
Forks465

Kibana vs M3: What are the differences?

Developers describe Kibana as "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. On the other hand, M3 is detailed as "Open source metrics platform built on M3DB, a distributed time-series database by Uber". A Prometheus and Graphite compatible metrics platform which includes a native distributed time series database, a highly dynamic and performant aggregation service, query engine and other supporting infrastructure.

Kibana and M3 can be categorized as "Monitoring" tools.

Some of the features offered by Kibana are:

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

On the other hand, M3 provides the following key features:

  • Prometheus Integration
  • Graphite Integration
  • Scalable Clusters (up to billions of metrics)

Kibana and M3 are both open source tools. Kibana with 12.4K GitHub stars and 4.81K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than M3 with 1.95K GitHub stars and 162 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Kibana, M3

matteo1989it
matteo1989it

Jun 26, 2019

ReviewonKibanaKibanaGrafanaGrafanaElasticsearchElasticsearch

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

757k views757k
Comments
StackShare
StackShare

Jun 25, 2019

Needs advice

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."

663k views663k
Comments
abrahamfathman
abrahamfathman

Jun 26, 2019

ReviewonKibanaKibanaSplunkSplunkGrafanaGrafana

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.

2.29M views2.29M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Kibana
Kibana
M3
M3

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.

A Prometheus and Graphite compatible metrics platform which includes a native distributed time series database, a highly dynamic and performant aggregation service, query engine and other supporting infrastructure.

Flexible analytics and visualization platform;Real-time summary and charting of streaming data;Intuitive interface for a variety of users;Instant sharing and embedding of dashboards
Prometheus Integration; Graphite Integration; Scalable Clusters (up to billions of metrics); Reliably Replicated; Highly Compressed; Highly Performant (hundreds of millions of writes per second); Arbitrary Time Precision; Out of order writes; Fully open source
Statistics
GitHub Stars
20.8K
GitHub Stars
4.9K
GitHub Forks
8.5K
GitHub Forks
465
Stacks
20.6K
Stacks
12
Followers
16.4K
Followers
61
Votes
262
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 88
    Easy to setup
  • 65
    Free
  • 45
    Can search text
  • 21
    Has pie chart
  • 13
    X-axis is not restricted to timestamp
Cons
  • 7
    Unintuituve
  • 4
    Elasticsearch is huge
  • 4
    Works on top of elastic only
  • 3
    Hardweight UI
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Logstash
Logstash
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch
Beats
Beats
Grafana
Grafana
Prometheus
Prometheus
Graphite
Graphite

What are some alternatives to Kibana, M3?

Grafana

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.

Prometheus

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.

Nagios

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

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

Zabbix

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Sensu

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Graphite

Graphite

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

Lumigo

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

StatsD

StatsD

It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

Jaeger

Jaeger

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

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