Kibana vs Zipkin

Overview

Kibana

Stacks20.6K

Followers16.4K

Votes262

GitHub Stars20.8K

Forks8.5K

Zipkin

Stacks199

Followers152

Votes10

GitHub Stars17.3K

Forks3.1K

Kibana vs Zipkin: What are the differences?

# Introduction
When choosing between Kibana and Zipkin for monitoring and visualizing data, understanding the key differences between the two tools is crucial.

1. **Data Sources**: Kibana is primarily used for visualizing data from Elasticsearch, while Zipkin is focused on distributed tracing for monitoring microservices architectures.
   
2. **Use Case**: Kibana is suited for log analysis, real-time application monitoring, and business intelligence, whereas Zipkin is designed specifically for tracing requests and understanding the latency in distributed systems.
   
3. **Visualization**: Kibana provides a wide range of visualization options such as histograms, line charts, and geo-maps for exploring Elasticsearch data, while Zipkin focuses on visualizing traces and providing detailed timing information for requests.
   
4. **Architecture**: Kibana is part of the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) and is typically used for analyzing and visualizing log data, whereas Zipkin is a standalone distributed tracing system that integrates with various frameworks and platforms.
   
5. **Alerting and Monitoring**: Kibana offers alerting capabilities for detecting anomalies in data and monitoring system performance, while Zipkin doesn't provide built-in alerting features but can be extended using plugins for monitoring purposes.

6. **Community Support**: Kibana has a larger community and extensive documentation due to its association with the ELK stack, making it easier to find resources and support compared to Zipkin, which has a smaller user base and community.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between Kibana and Zipkin is essential for selecting the right tool for monitoring and visualizing data in different use cases.

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Advice on Kibana, Zipkin

matteo1989it

Jun 26, 2019

Reviewon

Kibana

Grafana

Elasticsearch

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

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

Jun 26, 2019

Reviewon

Kibana

Splunk

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.

2.29M views2.29M

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Kibana	Zipkin
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.	It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures. Features include both the collection and lookup of this data.
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	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 20.8K	GitHub Stars 17.3K
GitHub Forks 8.5K	GitHub Forks 3.1K
Stacks 20.6K	Stacks 199
Followers 16.4K	Followers 152
Votes 262	Votes 10
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 Works on top of elastic only 4 Elasticsearch is huge 3 Hardweight UI	Pros 10 Open Source
Integrations
Logstash Elasticsearch Beats	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Kibana, Zipkin?

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

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

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

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

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, a Distributed Tracing System

Related Comparisons

Kibana vs Zipkin: What are the differences?

# Introduction
When choosing between Kibana and Zipkin for monitoring and visualizing data, understanding the key differences between the two tools is crucial.

1. **Data Sources**: Kibana is primarily used for visualizing data from Elasticsearch, while Zipkin is focused on distributed tracing for monitoring microservices architectures.
   
2. **Use Case**: Kibana is suited for log analysis, real-time application monitoring, and business intelligence, whereas Zipkin is designed specifically for tracing requests and understanding the latency in distributed systems.
   
3. **Visualization**: Kibana provides a wide range of visualization options such as histograms, line charts, and geo-maps for exploring Elasticsearch data, while Zipkin focuses on visualizing traces and providing detailed timing information for requests.
   
4. **Architecture**: Kibana is part of the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) and is typically used for analyzing and visualizing log data, whereas Zipkin is a standalone distributed tracing system that integrates with various frameworks and platforms.
   
5. **Alerting and Monitoring**: Kibana offers alerting capabilities for detecting anomalies in data and monitoring system performance, while Zipkin doesn't provide built-in alerting features but can be extended using plugins for monitoring purposes.

6. **Community Support**: Kibana has a larger community and extensive documentation due to its association with the ELK stack, making it easier to find resources and support compared to Zipkin, which has a smaller user base and community.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between Kibana and Zipkin is essential for selecting the right tool for monitoring and visualizing data in different use cases.

Kibana vs Zipkin

Overview