Grafana vs Kibana

Overview

What is being compared

Grafana is an open-source visualization platform that builds dashboards on top of many data sources. Kibana is the visualization layer of the Elastic Stack, built mainly to query Elasticsearch.

• Data sources — Dozens: Prometheus, Loki, InfluxDB, CloudWatch, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL — Primarily Elasticsearch indices
• Place in a stack — Standalone, connects to sources — Part of the Elastic Stack
• Best at — Metrics dashboards — Full-text log search and analytics
• Role — Dashboard standard for metrics — Search and analytics on Elasticsearch

How each one gets its data

Grafana stores nothing itself: it queries Prometheus, Loki, CloudWatch and the rest where the data already lives. Kibana reads Elasticsearch, which Beats or Logstash fill, and those indices need managing too.

What happens to a log index in Elasticsearch

Behind Kibana, every log index needs a lifecycle, or indices grow without bound and the disk fills. An ILM policy rolls the write index over and deletes old indices once they pass the retention window.

> [!TIP] Grafana's many sources next to Kibana on Elasticsearch, an incident traced from a metric spike to its logs in Explore and in Discover, and the questions that pick one, step by step in Visual Explanation below.

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