What would you choose for observability: Grafana observability platform or ELK stack?

Hi community,

Grafana observability has Grafana for visualization and analytics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces and Prometheus for metrics while

ELK stack has tools like Elasticsearch for search, Logistash for logs and Kibana for visualization.

Which of these 2 platforms would you choose and why?

Thank you.

Faustine Chisasa

System Administrator at TZ Telecom Ltd.

1 Answer

Last answered Oct 2, 2021

reviewer1602072

AVP, Site Reliability Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Real User

Oct 2, 2021

Hi @Faustine Chisasa,

I will go with ELK + Grafana.

Elasticsearch is highly distributed, scalable and fast. You got power of storage. Logstash is highly pluggable and rich in plugins. You can use any buffer or streaming platform in Logstash pipeline example: RabbitMQ, Kafka, redis, etc. ELK has watchers alerts.

S3 searchable snapshot is the best thing in the latest version of ELK which gives you long retention capabilities and search directly from S3 without restore to Elasticsearch.

Grafana can be used to connect to Elasticsearch and you can use all dashboard templates for monitoring.

Metricbeat gives you metrics from On-premise, EC2, Pivotal, cloudfoundry, cloudwatch.

Functionbeat gives you cloudwatch logs.

Grafana needs a separate license and native agents.
So all in all, a premium ELK license with open-source Grafana is the best stack for observability.

Cheers,

Sunil.