If I know Kibana, can I use Grafana?

Question

I have experienced using Kibana before. However this time, I'd like to try using Grafana. Does my experience guarantee that I can learn Grafana easily? Or is it a whole lot different from Kibana?

Please correct me if I'm wrong but so far, according to my research, both are for logs. Grafana is more of visualization only, while Kibana is for searching the logs; is this right?

Answer 1

Grafana is a fork of Kibana but they have developed in totally different directions since 2013.

1. Logs vs Metrics

Kibana focuses more on logs and adhoc search while Grafana focuses more on creating dashboards for visualizing time series data. This means Grafana is usually used together with Time Series databases like Graphite, InfluxDB or Elasticsearch with aggregations. Kibana is usually used for searching logs.

Metric queries tend to be really fast while searching logs is slower so they are usually used for different purposes. For example, I could look at a metric for memory usage on a server over the last 3 months and get an answer nearly instantly.

Brian Brazil (Prometheus) has written about logs vs metrics.

2. Data Sources

Kibana is for ElasticSearch and the ELK stack. Grafana supports lots of data sources. Even if you are using Grafana with ElasticSearch, you would not usually look at the same data (logs) as in Kibana. It would be data from Logstash or MetricBeat that can be aggregated (grouped by) rather than raw logs.

With Grafana you can mix and match data sources in the same dashboard e.g. ElasticSearch and Splunk.

Conclusion

Kibana and Grafana have some overlap. Kibana has TimeLion for metrics and Grafana has the Table Panel for logs. Lots of companies use both - Kibana for logs and Grafana for visualizing metrics.

They are different from each other so there will be a learning curve.