Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Amazon Kinesis VS Grafana

Compare Amazon Kinesis VS Grafana and see what are their differences

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Amazon Kinesis logo Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis services make it easy to work with real-time streaming data in the AWS cloud.

Grafana logo Grafana

Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases
  • Amazon Kinesis Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-28
  • Grafana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21

Grafana

$ Details
Release Date
2014 January
Startup details
Country
United States
State
New York
City
New York
Founder(s)
Anthony Woods
Employees
100 - 249

Amazon Kinesis features and specs

  • Real-time data processing
    Amazon Kinesis allows for real-time processing of data streams, enabling rapid ingestion and analysis of data as it arrives.
  • Scalability
    Kinesis is highly scalable and can handle massive volumes of streaming data, expanding automatically to meet your needs.
  • Fully managed service
    As a fully managed service, Kinesis handles infrastructure maintenance, provisioning, and scaling, reducing operational overhead.
  • Integration with AWS ecosystem
    Kinesis integrates seamlessly with other AWS services such as Lambda, Redshift, S3, and Elasticsearch, facilitating comprehensive data workflows.
  • Multiple data stream applications
    The service supports different types of data stream applications including data delivery, analytics, and real-time processing, making it versatile.
  • Security
    Offers robust security through integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), encryption at rest with AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and in-transit encryption.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon Kinesis

  • Cost
    While pricing is scalable, costs can escalate quickly with high data throughput and storage requirements, potentially becoming expensive for large-scale implementations.
  • Complex setup and management
    Despite being a managed service, the initial setup and tuning of Kinesis can be complex and may require specialized knowledge.
  • Latency
    Although designed for real-time data processing, there can be minor latency involved that might not fit ultra-low latency requirements.
  • Limited data retention
    Kinesis typically supports up to 7 days of data retention in streams, which might be insufficient for use cases requiring longer retention periods without extra storage solutions.
  • API Rate Limits
    API access to Kinesis is subject to rate limits, which could impact applications requiring high-frequency data ingestion and retrieval.
  • Dependence on AWS services
    Tight integration with AWS services can pose a challenge for organizations looking for a multi-cloud or cloud-agnostic strategy.

Grafana features and specs

  • Customizable Dashboards
    Grafana provides highly customizable and flexible dashboards, allowing users to create and arrange panels in a way that best represents their metrics and data.
  • Wide Range of Data Sources
    Grafana supports numerous data sources including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Graphite, AWS CloudWatch, and more, making it versatile and adaptable to various data environments.
  • Rich Plugin Ecosystem
    The platform offers a rich ecosystem of plugins for data visualization, data sources, and apps, enabling users to extend its functionality to suit specific needs.
  • Open Source
    As an open-source tool, Grafana is free to use and customize, allowing organizations to tailor it to their specific requirements without licensing costs.
  • Alerting System
    Grafana comes with a powerful alerting system that can notify users about important events through various channels like email, Slack, and PagerDuty.
  • Community and Support
    Grafana has a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, forums, and tutorials to help users solve issues and improve their dashboards.

Possible disadvantages of Grafana

  • Learning Curve
    The extensive customization features and numerous data sources can be overwhelming for new users, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Performance Issues with Large Datasets
    When dealing with very large datasets or high-cardinality data, performance issues can arise, requiring additional tuning or more powerful infrastructure.
  • Limited Built-in Data Storage
    Grafana itself does not store data; it relies on external data sources. This could necessitate using additional services or infrastructure for data storage.
  • Complex Setup for Alerting
    Setting up and managing the alerting system can be complicated, especially for users who are not familiar with monitoring and alerting concepts.
  • Dependence on External Data Sources
    The effectiveness of Grafana depends heavily on the quality and stability of the external data sources it connects to, which can be a point of failure.
  • Cost for Enterprise Features
    While the open-source version is free, advanced features and support are available only in the paid enterprise version, which could be costly for some organizations.

Analysis of Amazon Kinesis

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Amazon Kinesis is a good option for organizations that need to process and analyze large streams of data in real-time. Its scalability, ease of integration with existing AWS infrastructure, and advanced features make it a preferred choice for many enterprise-level applications.

Why this product is good

  • Amazon Kinesis is generally considered a robust choice for real-time data processing because it can ingest, buffer, and process streaming data at scale. It offers features like durable storage, the ability to handle high throughput with low latency, and seamless integration with other AWS services. This makes it particularly well-suited for applications that require real-time analytics, data lake integrations, or reacting to changing data streams with minimal delay.

Recommended for

  • Organizations dealing with large quantities of streaming data
  • Businesses needing real-time data analytics and processing
  • Developers looking for seamless integration with AWS services
  • Teams wanting to build real-time machine learning models
  • Companies implementing IoT solutions requiring data streaming

Analysis of Grafana

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Grafana is generally considered to be a good choice for users looking for a powerful, flexible, and user-friendly data visualization tool. Its ability to integrate with numerous data sources and its rich feature set make it a popular choice among developers, engineers, and IT operations teams.

Why this product is good

  • Grafana is widely regarded as a robust and versatile open-source data visualization and monitoring platform. It supports a wide range of data sources like Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and many others, making it highly adaptable for various use cases. Grafana's intuitive and interactive dashboards allow users to visually track the performance and health of their system in real-time, enhance operational efficiency, and facilitate better decision-making. Its strong community support, frequent updates, and rich plugin ecosystem further contribute to its reputation as a reliable tool for monitoring and analytics.

Recommended for

    Grafana is particularly recommended for IT professionals, data analysts, and engineers who need to monitor and visualize large datasets in real-time. It's ideal for organizations running complex systems or applications that require comprehensive monitoring to ensure uptime and performance are maintained. Additionally, Grafana is suitable for teams that value open-source solutions and require a platform that can integrate with multiple data sources and adapt to various monitoring needs.

Amazon Kinesis videos

AWS Big Data - Amazon Kinesis Analytics Introduction and Demonstration

More videos:

  • Review - Analyzing Data Streams in Real Time with Amazon Kinesis: PNNL's Serverless Data Lake Ingestion

Grafana videos

Grafana vs Kibana | Beautiful data graphs and log analysis systems

More videos:

  • Review - Business Dashboards with Grafana and MySQL
  • Review - Grafana Labs 2019 Year in Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon Kinesis and Grafana)
Stream Processing
100 100%
0% 0
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Data Management
100 100%
0% 0
Data Dashboard
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Amazon Kinesis and Grafana

Amazon Kinesis Reviews

Top 10 AWS ETL Tools and How to Choose the Best One | Visual Flow
Amazon Kinesis was built to handle massive amounts of data, allowing it to be uploaded to a Redshift cluster. After the event stream is read and the data is transformed, it is placed into a table in Amazon SCTS in an Amazon ES domain. Thus, there is no need to use a server (instead, you need to integrate AWS ETL and AWS Lambda).
Source: visual-flow.com
6 Best Kafka Alternatives: 2022’s Must-know List
Kinesis enables streaming applications to be managed without additional infrastructure management. This highly scalable platform can process data from various sources with low latency. Known for its speed, ease of use, reliability, and capability of cross-platform replication, Amazon Kinesis is one of the most popular Kafka Alternatives. It is used for many purposes,...
Source: hevodata.com
Top 15 Kafka Alternatives Popular In 2021
Amazon Kinesis, also known as Kinesis Streams, is a popular alternative to Kafka, for collecting, processing, and analyzing video and data streams in real-time. It offers timely and insightful information, streaming data in a cost-effective manner with complete flexibility and scalability. It is easy to ingest data encompassing audios, videos, app logs, etc. It offers an...
16 Top Big Data Analytics Tools You Should Know About
Amazon Kinesis is a massively scalable, cloud-based analytics service which is designed for real-time applications.

Grafana Reviews

Self Hosting Like Its 2025
If you’re looking for straightforward monitoring and the thought of setting up a full Zabbix or Grafana stack seems daunting, this software is a real lifesaver. With just one deployment, you can monitor your services and receive notifications through a wide variety of channels including…
Source: kiranet.org
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Middleware is one such Grafana alternative that offers robust data monitoring and visualization capabilities at affordable prices. Though it’s commercial, unlike Grafana, its rich feature set ensures accommodating your present and future business needs.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Are you looking for Grafana alternatives? Then you have come to the right place. Grafana started as a data visualization tool. It slowly evolved into a tool that can take data from multiple data sources for visualization. For observability, Grafana offers the LGTM stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). You need to configure...
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
For this reason, many have set out in search of Grafana alternatives. Since you’ve landed yourself here, I’m guessing that you’re one of those people. Fear not! We’ve put together a comprehensive list of the 10 best Grafana alternatives out there today.
Source: sematext.com
Top 10 Tableau Open Source Alternatives: A Comprehensive List
When it comes to visualization, Grafana is a great tool for visualizing time series data with support for various databases including Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Graphite. It is also compatible with relational databases such as MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. While Tableau can do the same thing, Grafana’s open-source status allows the users to add additional data sources and...
Source: hevodata.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Grafana should be more popular than Amazon Kinesis. It has been mentiond 240 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Amazon Kinesis mentions (26)

  • FINTECH SCALABILITY
    Real-Time Processing — With Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB, fintech firms can analyze transactions instantly, identify fraud before it happens. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Top 7 Kafka Alternatives For Real-Time Data Processing
    Amazon Kinesis is a fully managed real-time data streaming service by AWS, designed for large-scale data ingestion and processing. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • AWS Operational issue – Multiple services in us-east-1
    Https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/ > Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a serverless streaming data service that simplifies the capture, processing, and storage of data streams at any scale. I'd never heard of that one. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Event-Driven Architecture on AWS
    Event Consumers: Services that actively listen for events and respond accordingly. These consumers can be easily implemented using microservices, AWS Lambda or Amazon Kinesis (for ingesting, processing, and analyzing streaming data in real-time). - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • AWS DEV OPS Professional Exam short notes
    When you see Amazon Kinesis as an option, this becomes the ideal option to process data in real time. Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost effectively process streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

Grafana mentions (240)

  • The synergy between DevOps and Cloud Computing
    Monitoring and Logging: Tools like Prometheus and Grafana provide instant observability. - Source: dev.to / 10 days ago
  • Project of the Week: Grafana
    Grafana is a leading open-source platform for monitoring, visualization, and observability. Since its initial launch in 2014, Grafana has grown to become the standard for time series analytics, with over 68,000 GitHub stars and a thriving ecosystem of plugins and integrations. The platform allows users to query, visualize, alert on, and understand metrics no matter where they're stored, enabling the creation of... - Source: dev.to / 11 days ago
  • Send Node.js logs from Docker to Grafana Cloud with Alloy
    Navigate to Grafana Cloud and sign up or log in. In the sidebar, select Connections → Add new connection, select Loki. This is the place that prompts you to set up your Loki connection and allows you to generate an access token for Alloy. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Monitoring API Requests and Responses for System Health
    Prometheus + Grafana: Open-source tools that offer maximum flexibility without ongoing licensing costs—ideal for teams willing to manage their own infrastructure and configuration. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • How to Optimize Your Fintech API in 2025: A Guide
    Prometheus: This open-source monitoring solution pairs with Grafana for powerful custom visualization of exactly what matters to your business. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon Kinesis and Grafana, you can also consider the following products

Confluent - Confluent offers a real-time data platform built around Apache Kafka.

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Apache Flink - Flink is a streaming dataflow engine that provides data distribution, communication, and fault tolerance for distributed computations.

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Spark Streaming - Spark Streaming makes it easy to build scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications.

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources