Zabbix vs grafana vs kibana

Atul Agrawal picture Atul Agrawal · Nov 30, 2016 · Viewed 21.4k times · Source

I am exploring grafana for my log management and system monitoring. I found kibana is also used for same process. I just don't know when to use kibana and when to use grafana and when to use zabbix?

Answer

Lubomir Varga picture Lubomir Varga · Jan 20, 2017

Zabbix - complex monitoring solution including data gathering, data archiving (trends, compaction,...), visualizer with dashboards, alerting and some management support for alerts escalations. (have a look at collectd, prometheus, cacti. They are all able to gather data)

Grafana - visualizer of data. It can read data at least from prometheus, graphite and elastics. Its primary goal is to visualize things in user defined dashboards and correlate things from possibly various sources. You can for example see cpu load (float time serie data from prometheus for example) with nice annotations referring to some special event in log file (loaded from elastics of course)

Kibana - visualization + analytics on logged data into elastics. Have a fast look at kibana discover to get idea. It is "must to have" tool when you need to search your logs (various services, various servers) in one place.