Data Visualization Tools – Grafana vs. Kibana vs. Tableau
DATA! An important need today. Organizations need data to analyze and proactively take informed decisions. And this is where “Data Visualization Tools-DVT” play a vital role. There are a number of DVT that exist in our IT industry and each one of them offer excellent features. But, the key question is “which tool” will suffice.
Let us take a quick look at the key features of the commonly used DVTs (some recent ones that I explored) – Grafana, Kibana and Tableau; and try answering the key question.
| Description | Grafana | Kibana | Tableau |
| Key area | Monitor metrics | Explore log data | Business analytics |
| Data source/s supported | Graphite, Prometheus, InfluxDB, MySQL, and more sources supported | Only Elasticsearch supported | Multiple sources supported. Additionally users can create custom connections with JDBC,ODBC, etc |
| Querying capability | Query editor available with each data source allowing users to construct queries easily | Query DSL (Domain Specific Language) supported | Custom SQL available as a feature to build queries |
| Alerting technique | Built-in alerting capability through conditional rules that can send notifications to Slack, PagerDuty, etc | Not available out-of-the box, but available with hosted and priced version | Only email notifications supported |
| Offering/Licensing | Free version available as open source. Enterprise edition also available that is hosted and priced. | Free version available as open source. Enterprise edition called Elastic Cloud available that is hosted and priced. | Licensed software, paid software(trial version available) |
| Latest version | 7.4 | 7.11.1 | 2020.4 |
| Official website | Click here | Click here | Click here |
The selection for the right DVT depends upon on “what the need is” or to say “what kind of outcomes are required“. While licensing and pricing may also secondary affects on the decision but its important to address the problem and find the right fit.
So, which is your favorite DVT? Or are you still researching for one ?? Do share in your views 🙂
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About The Author
ramz
A DevOps Practitioner with 23+ years of IT experience. She started her career as a developer, later graduated into different roles in the product lifecycle. Over the past decade, she has been providing consulting to a number of customers across the globe on adopting and practising DevOps and Agile, implementing tools and technologies to increase automation, tracking their maturity levels through metrics/OKRs, and in the recent years experimenting AI-based solutions. She co-authored a book named "Hands-On guide to Agile Operations", available at amazon.com She is the chapter lead for the Toronto region for the Canada DevOps Community. Ref: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raminder-devops-practitioner/