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Kibana vs Thanos: What are the differences?

  1. Key difference between Kibana and Thanos: Kibana is a data visualization platform that provides a user-friendly interface to explore, analyze, and visualize data stored in ElasticSearch. On the other hand, Thanos is a scalable, highly available, and durable Prometheus platform that provides long-term storage and global query capabilities.
  2. Integration capabilities: Kibana integrates seamlessly with the Elastic Stack, allowing users to leverage the full power of ElasticSearch for data storage and retrieval. Thanos, on the other hand, integrates with Prometheus, extending its capabilities with long-term storage and cross-cluster query support.
  3. Storage architecture: Kibana relies on ElasticSearch for data storage, utilizing its distributed and scalable architecture. In contrast, Thanos introduces a global-scale storage architecture by leveraging object storage systems like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage, which enables efficient querying across multiple Prometheus instances.
  4. Data retention: Kibana does not provide specialized features for long-term data retention and relies on the capabilities of ElasticSearch for data persistence. However, Thanos is specifically designed for long-term data retention, allowing users to store and query data over extended periods efficiently.
  5. Horizontal scalability: Kibana achieves horizontal scalability by deploying multiple instances and configuring load balancers. In contrast, Thanos scales horizontally by distributing query workload across multiple Prometheus instances and coordinating data retrieval from the backend storage.
  6. Federation support: Thanos introduces the concept of federation, enabling efficient querying across multiple Prometheus servers by merging the results of individual Prometheus queries. Kibana, on the other hand, does not have built-in federation support.

In summary, Kibana is a data visualization platform integrated with ElasticSearch, while Thanos is a scalable Prometheus platform with long-term storage and global query capabilities. Their key differences lie in integration capabilities, storage architecture, data retention, horizontal scalability, and federation support.

Advice on Kibana and Thanos
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 · 593.6K 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 Kibana and Thanos
Leonardo Henrique da Paixão
Junior QA Tester at SolarMarket · | 15 upvotes · 353.7K 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 Kibana
Pros of Thanos
  • 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
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    Cons of Kibana
    Cons of Thanos
    • 6
      Unintuituve
    • 4
      Elasticsearch is huge
    • 3
      Hardweight UI
    • 3
      Works on top of elastic only
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      - No public GitHub repository available -

      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.

      What is Thanos?

      Thanos is a set of components that can be composed into a highly available metric system with unlimited storage capacity. It can be added seamlessly on top of existing Prometheus deployments and leverages the Prometheus 2.0 storage format to cost-efficiently store historical metric data in any object storage while retaining fast query latencies. Additionally, it provides a global query view across all Prometheus installations and can merge data from Prometheus HA pairs on the fly.

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      Jobs that mention Kibana and Thanos as a desired skillset
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      What tools integrate with Kibana?
      What tools integrate with Thanos?

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      Blog Posts

      May 21 2019 at 12:20AM

      Elastic

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      12
      5164
      GitHubPythonReact+42
      49
      40724
      GitHubGitPython+22
      17
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      What are some alternatives to Kibana and Thanos?
      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!
      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.
      Loggly
      It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.
      Graylog
      Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.
      Splunk
      It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
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