Grafana vs Kibana: Dashboards for Metrics vs Logs
Grafana is a source-agnostic dashboarding tool strong on metrics; Kibana is the visualization layer for Elasticsearch, strong on logs and search.
Grafana visualizes data from many sources - Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, SQL - and excels at metrics dashboards and alerting. Kibana is the front end of the Elastic Stack, purpose-built for exploring, searching, and visualizing data in Elasticsearch, especially logs. They overlap but lead in different domains.
| Grafana | Kibana | |
|---|---|---|
| Data sources | Many (Prometheus, Loki, SQL...) | Elasticsearch-centric |
| Strength | Metrics dashboards | Log search and exploration |
| Alerting | Built-in, unified | Via Elastic features |
| Lock-in | Source-agnostic | Elastic Stack |
| Best for | Mixed-source metrics | Elasticsearch log analytics |
In practice
Grafana is the default when you pull from multiple backends and want unified metrics dashboards and alerting. Kibana is the choice when your data lives in Elasticsearch and you need powerful log search and exploration. Many teams run both: Grafana for metrics, Kibana (or Grafana + Loki) for logs. Pick by where your data lives and whether you want source-agnostic dashboards.
Note
Both can visualize CI pipeline and build telemetry. The builds themselves run on CI runners; faster managed runners shorten them.
The verdict
Want multi-source metrics dashboards and unified alerting: Grafana. Living in Elasticsearch and needing strong log search: Kibana. They complement each other - metrics in Grafana, Elastic logs in Kibana.