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Kibana vs Papertrail: What are the differences?
# Introduction
This markdown code compares the key differences between Kibana and Papertrail for website use.
1. **User Interface**: Kibana offers a highly customizable and visually appealing user interface that allows users to create complex visualizations and dashboards. In contrast, Papertrail has a more straightforward and streamlined interface focused on log management and searching tasks.
2. **Feature Set**: Kibana is a robust tool with a wide range of features such as data visualization, reporting, and machine learning capabilities. On the other hand, Papertrail primarily focuses on log aggregation, monitoring, and real-time log searching without the extensive visualization capabilities of Kibana.
3. **Use Case**: Kibana is often used in conjunction with Elasticsearch for analyzing and visualizing large volumes of data, making it suitable for data analysis and business intelligence purposes. Papertrail, on the other hand, is commonly used by developers and system administrators for monitoring and troubleshooting applications by analyzing log data.
4. **Integration**: Kibana seamlessly integrates with Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Beats (ELK stack) to provide a comprehensive data analysis solution. In contrast, Papertrail can be integrated with various services and platforms but primarily focuses on log management without the extensive integration options offered by Kibana.
5. **On-Premises Deployment**: Kibana can be deployed on-premises, offering users more control over their data and infrastructure. Papertrail, on the other hand, is a cloud-based service hosted by SolarWinds, limiting users' control over the storage and management of log data.
6. **Cost Structure**: Kibana is an open-source software with a free version available, but there are costs involved in setting up and maintaining the ELK stack infrastructure. Papertrail offers a subscription-based model with a range of pricing plans based on log volume, providing a more straightforward cost structure for users.
In Summary, Kibana and Papertrail differ in their user interfaces, feature sets, use cases, integration options, deployment methods, and cost structures.
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 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 Papertrail
- Log search85
- Easy log aggregation across multiple machines43
- Integrates with Heroku43
- Simple interface37
- Backup to S326
- Easy setup, independent of existing logging setup19
- Heroku add-on15
- Command line interface3
- Alerting1
- Good for Startups1
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Cons of Kibana
- Unintuituve7
- Works on top of elastic only4
- Elasticsearch is huge4
- Hardweight UI3
Cons of Papertrail
- Expensive2
- External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging1
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