What is Kibana?
Kibana is a part of the ELK stack and is an open-source visualization, used for time-series analysis, log analysis, and for monitoring of applications. It has a tool known as Canvas that is used for presentation purposes. With this kind of tool, the user can create slide decks that help in extracting real-time data directly from Elasticsearch. With the features like charts, tables, maps, and other tools in Kibana, real-time data can be viewed.
Key Features
- Easy drag-and-drop experience.
- Time Series Visual Builder (TSVB)
- Numerous measures are there to display the data in the form of a Line chart, area chart, bar chart, heat map, and pie chart.
- It has community-driven plugin modules.
Advantages
- It is an open-source tool.
- Its setup is quite easy.
- It is highly interactive.
- Canvas visualization is used to analyze complex data.
- It provides real-time data analysis and monitoring.
- It has a user-friendly interface and easy-to-use dashboard customization options.
- It integrates with other data sources and software tools, making it highly versatile.
- It offers different types of visualizations, including tables, maps, and graphs, to analyze data in different ways.
- It allows for centralized log management and analysis, making it easier to troubleshoot issues and identify patterns.
Disadvantages
- Security issues.
- It is quite slow. Plugins add-on is also a difficult task.
- Debugging option is not available.
- It requires a significant amount of hardware resources and may not be suitable for small-scale applications.
- It has limited support for data transformation and processing.
- It lacks native alerting and notification features, which may require the use of third-party tools.
- It has a steeper learning curve for complex queries and analytics.
Kibana vs Splunk
Kibana is an open-source visualization tool whereas Splunk comes under the category of log management and analysis. Both Kibana and Splunk are tools that have outstanding features. Setting-up Kibana is quite easy whereas setting up Splunk is a complex task. It is not at all easy to choose which one to use as both support features of visualization that are Graph, Histogram, Table, and Heatmap.