Logstash vs Prometheus

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Logstash

10.9K
8K
+ 1
102
Prometheus

3.4K
3.6K
+ 1
239
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Logstash vs Prometheus: What are the differences?

Developers describe Logstash as "Collect, Parse, & Enrich Data". Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana. On the other hand, Prometheus is detailed as "An open-source service monitoring system and time series database, developed by SoundCloud". 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.

Logstash can be classified as a tool in the "Log Management" category, while Prometheus is grouped under "Monitoring Tools".

Some of the features offered by Logstash are:

  • Centralize data processing of all types
  • Normalize varying schema and formats
  • Quickly extend to custom log formats

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

  • a multi-dimensional data model (timeseries defined by metric name and set of key/value dimensions)
  • a flexible query language to leverage this dimensionality
  • no dependency on distributed storage

"Free" is the top reason why over 60 developers like Logstash, while over 32 developers mention "Powerful easy to use monitoring" as the leading cause for choosing Prometheus.

Logstash and Prometheus are both open source tools. It seems that Prometheus with 25K GitHub stars and 3.55K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Logstash with 10.3K GitHub stars and 2.78K GitHub forks.

Airbnb, reddit, and Typeform are some of the popular companies that use Logstash, whereas Prometheus is used by Uber Technologies, Slack, and DigitalOcean. Logstash has a broader approval, being mentioned in 561 company stacks & 278 developers stacks; compared to Prometheus, which is listed in 243 company stacks and 85 developer stacks.

Advice on Logstash and Prometheus
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 659.9K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

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Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 444.4K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.

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Sunil Chaudhari
Needs advice
on
MetricbeatMetricbeat
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Hi, We have a situation, where we are using Prometheus to get system metrics from PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) platform. We send that as time-series data to Cortex via a Prometheus server and built a dashboard using Grafana. There is another pipeline where we need to read metrics from a Linux server using Metricbeat, CPU, memory, and Disk. That will be sent to Elasticsearch and Grafana will pull and show the data in a dashboard.

Is it OK to use Metricbeat for Linux server or can we use Prometheus?

What is the difference in system metrics sent by Metricbeat and Prometheus node exporters?

Regards, Sunil.

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Replies (2)
Matthew Rothstein
Recommends
on
PrometheusPrometheus

If you're already using Prometheus for your system metrics, then it seems like standing up Elasticsearch just for Linux host monitoring is excessive. The node_exporter is probably sufficient if you'e looking for standard system metrics.

Another thing to consider is that Metricbeat / ELK use a push model for metrics delivery, whereas Prometheus pulls metrics from each node it is monitoring. Depending on how you manage your network security, opting for one solution over two may make things simpler.

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Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

Hi Sunil! Unfortunately, I don´t have much experience with Metricbeat so I can´t advise on the diffs with Prometheus...for Linux server, I encourage you to use Prometheus node exporter and for PCF, I would recommend using the instana tile (https://www.instana.com/supported-technologies/pivotal-cloud-foundry/). Let me know if you have further questions! Regards Jose

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Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 593.7K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.

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Replies (2)
Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/

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Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.

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Pros of Logstash
Pros of Prometheus
  • 68
    Free
  • 18
    Easy but powerful filtering
  • 12
    Scalable
  • 2
    Kibana provides machine learning based analytics to log
  • 1
    Great to meet GDPR goals
  • 1
    Well Documented
  • 47
    Powerful easy to use monitoring
  • 38
    Flexible query language
  • 32
    Dimensional data model
  • 27
    Alerts
  • 23
    Active and responsive community
  • 22
    Extensive integrations
  • 19
    Easy to setup
  • 12
    Beautiful Model and Query language
  • 7
    Easy to extend
  • 6
    Nice
  • 3
    Written in Go
  • 2
    Good for experimentation
  • 1
    Easy for monitoring

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Cons of Logstash
Cons of Prometheus
  • 4
    Memory-intensive
  • 1
    Documentation difficult to use
  • 12
    Just for metrics
  • 6
    Bad UI
  • 6
    Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints
  • 4
    Not easy to configure and use
  • 3
    Supports only active agents
  • 2
    Written in Go
  • 2
    TLS is quite difficult to understand
  • 2
    Requires multiple applications and tools
  • 1
    Single point of failure

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What is Logstash?

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.

What is 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.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Logstash?
What companies use Prometheus?
See which teams inside your own company are using Logstash or Prometheus.
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What tools integrate with Logstash?
What tools integrate with Prometheus?

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Blog Posts

Dec 8 2020 at 5:50PM

DigitalOcean

GitHubMySQLPostgreSQL+11
2
2202
May 21 2020 at 12:02AM

Rancher Labs

KubernetesAmazon EC2Grafana+12
5
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PythonDockerKubernetes+14
11
2325
Node.jsnpmKubernetes+6
1
1283
May 21 2019 at 12:20AM

Elastic

ElasticsearchKibanaLogstash+4
12
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GitHubPythonReact+42
48
40274
What are some alternatives to Logstash and Prometheus?
Fluentd
Fluentd collects events from various data sources and writes them to files, RDBMS, NoSQL, IaaS, SaaS, Hadoop and so on. Fluentd helps you unify your logging infrastructure.
Splunk
It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
Kafka
Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.
Beats
Beats is the platform for single-purpose data shippers. They send data from hundreds or thousands of machines and systems to Logstash or Elasticsearch.
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.
See all alternatives