45
votes

What are the main differences between Graylog2 and Kibana?

We already use Graylog2 but I must admit I don't really like the UI. Just wonder in case it may be helpful to switch to Kibana.

2

2 Answers

34
votes

At my company we started with Graylog2 and recently installed Kibana3. My personal opinion is that Kibana3 is more suited towards non-dev, while Graylog isn't.

Kibana:

  • Pretty dashboards
  • Graphs, charts and images
  • "panel" customization, adding parallel coordinate graphs for example
  • Easy/flexible management of dashboards (they save directly into their own ES index)
  • Easy deployment (just clone the Kibana3 repo and serve it with your fav. web server)

Graylog2

  • Much simpler interface
  • Plain log "analysis" and good search capabilities
  • Built in authentication and user permissions
  • Built in alert mechanisms for your chosen streams

We still have Graylog2 running in parallel to Kibana3, but I don't think it will last for much longer. Kibana3 provides most, if not all, of the capabilities (that we needed), and on top of that it allows management friendly interfaces.

12
votes

Having worked with both quite extensively, I can say that a merger between both would be great. The alerting on streams in Graylog is really neat and gets you very quick actionable metrics. Then again, Kibana's panel customization (although not as fully featured as many think) is very nice. The mixing and matching of queries and filters in context of a specific panel is very powerful. If only Kibana would integrate a similar stream-like panel with alerting...