What is the difference between kibana and opentsdb

Question

As I know kibana and opentsdb both can be used in conjunction with Elastic logstash kibana (ELK) stack.

OpenTSDB offers a built-in, simple user interface for selecting one or more metrics and tags to generate a graph as an image. Alternatively an HTTP API is available to tie OpenTSDB into external systems such as monitoring frameworks, dashboards, statistics packages or automation tools. Each (Time series daemon)TSD uses the open source database HBase to store and retrieve time-series data.

Kibana can also be used for plotting metrics with access logs and custom logs, how does opentsdb helps in the system?

Answer 1

OpenTSDB is a time-series database. You could use OpenTSDB alongside Elasticsearch, for the metrics component. You would use Elasticsearch for text (logs perhaps) and OpenTSDB for metrics.

If you are using Logstash, there is an output that can export metrics from logs into OpenTSDB.

Kibana is a visualization tool for Elasticsearch queries. It assists you with searching and viewing the data that is stored in Elasticsearch. It is only used with Elasticsearch.

If you would like a unified front-end for Elasticsearch and OpenTSDB, you could consider Grafana, which has support for both Elasticsearch and OpenTSDB, but less functionality than Kibana in regard to Elasticsearch.