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Apache Flink VS Kibana

Compare Apache Flink VS Kibana and see what are their differences

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Apache Flink logo Apache Flink

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

Kibana logo Kibana

Easily visualize data pushed into Elasticsearch from Logstash, es-hadoop or 3rd party technologies...
  • Apache Flink Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-03
  • Kibana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21

Apache Flink features and specs

  • Real-time Stream Processing
    Apache Flink is designed for real-time data streaming, offering low-latency processing capabilities that are essential for applications requiring immediate data insights.
  • Event Time Processing
    Flink supports event time processing, which allows it to handle out-of-order events effectively and provide accurate results based on the time events actually occurred rather than when they were processed.
  • State Management
    Flink provides robust state management features, making it easier to maintain and query state across distributed nodes, which is crucial for managing long-running applications.
  • Fault Tolerance
    The framework includes built-in mechanisms for fault tolerance, such as consistent checkpoints and savepoints, ensuring high reliability and data consistency even in the case of failures.
  • Scalability
    Apache Flink is highly scalable, capable of handling both batch and stream processing workloads across a distributed cluster, making it suitable for large-scale data processing tasks.
  • Rich Ecosystem
    Flink has a rich set of APIs and integrations with other big data tools, such as Apache Kafka, Apache Hadoop, and Apache Cassandra, enhancing its versatility and ease of integration into existing data pipelines.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Flink

  • Complexity
    Flink’s advanced features and capabilities come with a steep learning curve, making it more challenging to set up and use compared to simpler stream processing frameworks.
  • Resource Intensive
    The framework can be resource-intensive, requiring substantial memory and CPU resources for optimal performance, which might be a concern for smaller setups or cost-sensitive environments.
  • Community Support
    While growing, the community around Apache Flink is not as large or mature as some other big data frameworks like Apache Spark, potentially limiting the availability of community-contributed resources and support.
  • Ecosystem Maturity
    Despite its integrations, the Flink ecosystem is still maturing, and certain tools and plugins may not be as developed or stable as those available for more established frameworks.
  • Operational Overhead
    Running and maintaining a Flink cluster can involve significant operational overhead, including monitoring, scaling, and troubleshooting, which might require a dedicated team or additional expertise.

Kibana features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    Kibana features an intuitive and visually appealing interface, making it easier for users to explore and visualize data without requiring in-depth technical knowledge.
  • Powerful Visualizations
    Offers a wide variety of visualizations including bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, and heat maps, enabling comprehensive data analysis and insights.
  • Real-Time Data Analysis
    Allows for the real-time monitoring and analysis of data, providing immediate insights and helping in quick decision-making processes.
  • Integration with Elastic Stack
    Seamlessly integrates with Elasticsearch and other components of the Elastic Stack, ensuring smooth data ingestion, storage, and retrieval.
  • Custom Dashboards
    Provides the ability to create and customize dashboards, allowing users to tailor visualizations to meet specific business needs and preferences.
  • Timelion Plugin
    The Timelion plugin offers advanced time-series analysis capabilities, enabling users to perform more complex data manipulations and visualizations.
  • Extensible Platform
    Highly extensible through plugins and APIs, allowing users to add new features and integrate with other tools and services.
  • Alerting and Reporting
    Includes built-in alerting and reporting features which help in proactively managing systems and sharing insights with stakeholders.

Possible disadvantages of Kibana

  • Steeper Learning Curve
    While user-friendly, getting the most out of Kibana can require a significant learning curve, especially for users unfamiliar with data visualization or Elasticsearch.
  • Performance Issues with Large Datasets
    Kibana can experience performance degradation when handling very large datasets, which may affect the responsiveness and usability of the platform.
  • Limited Advanced Data Analysis
    Although it offers robust visualization capabilities, Kibana lacks some advanced analytical features available in specialized data analysis tools.
  • Complex Setup and Maintenance
    Setting up and maintaining Kibana, especially in a production environment, can be complex and time-consuming, often requiring dedicated resources.
  • Cost
    While the basic version of Kibana is free, advanced features available in the paid (premium) versions can be quite costly, which might be a limitation for small businesses.
  • Limited Customization
    Although quite flexible, Kibana has some limitations in terms of customization options for specific visualizations and user interfaces.
  • Dependency on Elasticsearch
    Kibana relies heavily on Elasticsearch for data retrieval and storage, meaning any issues with Elasticsearch can directly impact Kibana's performance and functionality.

Analysis of Apache Flink

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Apache Flink is considered a good distributed stream processing framework.

Why this product is good

  • Rich api
    Flink offers a rich set of APIs for various levels of abstraction, catering to different needs of developers.
  • Scalability
    Flink provides excellent horizontal scalability, making it suitable for handling large data streams and high-throughput applications.
  • Fault tolerance
    Flink's checkpointing mechanism ensures fault-tolerance, maintaining data state consistency even after failures.
  • Ease of integration
    Flink integrates well with other big data tools and ecosystems, facilitating broader data architecture designs.
  • Real-time processing
    It excels at processing data in real-time, allowing for immediate insights and action on streaming data.
  • Community and support
    Being a part of the Apache Software Foundation, Flink benefits from a large community and comprehensive documentation.
  • Complex event processing
    It supports complex event processing, which is essential for many real-time applications.

Recommended for

  • real-time analytics
  • stream data processing
  • complex event processing
  • machine learning in streaming applications
  • applications requiring high-throughput and low-latency processing
  • companies looking for robust fault-tolerance in distributed systems

Analysis of Kibana

Overall verdict

  • Kibana is a robust and versatile platform that excels in providing insightful visualizations and real-time data analysis, particularly for users leveraging Elasticsearch. Its user-friendly interface and extensive features make it a valuable tool for businesses looking to harness the power of their data.

Why this product is good

  • Kibana, developed by Elastic.co, is considered an effective tool for data visualization and exploration. It is particularly well-regarded for its seamless integration with Elasticsearch, making it ideal for visualizing large datasets. Users appreciate its rich set of visualization tools, including dashboards, pie charts, and geospatial data mapping. Its ability to handle real-time data is another strong point, allowing users to monitor and troubleshoot systems efficiently.

Recommended for

  • Data analysts and scientists seeking advanced visualization capabilities.
  • Organizations already using Elasticsearch.
  • IT professionals needing to monitor and troubleshoot system performance in real-time.
  • Businesses desiring customizable dashboards and reports for data-driven decision making.
  • Development teams interested in open-source data exploration tools.

Apache Flink videos

GOTO 2019 • Introduction to Stateful Stream Processing with Apache Flink • Robert Metzger

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Apache Flink Tutorial | Flink vs Spark | Real Time Analytics Using Flink | Apache Flink Training
  • Tutorial - How to build a modern stream processor: The science behind Apache Flink - Stefan Richter

Kibana videos

Analyzing Server Logs with Kibana

More videos:

  • Review - Grafana vs Kibana | Beautiful data graphs and log analysis systems

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apache Flink and Kibana)
Big Data
100 100%
0% 0
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Stream Processing
100 100%
0% 0
Log Management
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 Apache Flink and Kibana

Apache Flink Reviews

We have no reviews of Apache Flink yet.
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Kibana Reviews

Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Assess how well the Grafana alternative integrates with your existing tools stack. For instance, Kibana is best suited for Elasticsearch environments, while Middleware is the most advanced solution to operate and monitor in Kubernetes environments.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Kibana is an integral component within the Elastic Stack (ELK), offering advanced visualization and analysis capabilities. Beats, which is also a part of the ELK Stack, is responsible for collecting and forwarding log data to Logstash for initial processing. Logstash, in turn, applies various data transformations and subsequently stores the processed data in Elasticsearch....
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Linux Monitoring Tools and Software to Improve Server Performance [2022 Comparison]
Lastly, the Elastic Stack (ELK Stack) is a well-known tool for Linux performance monitoring. It’s composed of Elasticsearch (full-text search), Logstash (a log aggregator), Kibana (visualization via graphs and charts), and Beats (lightweight metrics collectors and shippers).
Source: sematext.com
4 Best Open Source Dashboard Monitoring Tools In 2019
Kibana is part of Elastic’s product suite and is often used in what we call an ELK stack : ElasticSearch + Logstash + Kibana.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Flink seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 41 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.

Apache Flink mentions (41)

  • What is Apache Flink? Exploring Its Open Source Business Model, Funding, and Community
    Continuous Learning: Leverage online tutorials from the official Flink website and attend webinars for deeper insights. - Source: dev.to / 27 days ago
  • Is RisingWave the Next Apache Flink?
    Apache Flink, known initially as Stratosphere, is a distributed stream processing engine initiated by a group of researchers at TU Berlin. Since its initial release in May 2011, Flink has gained immense popularity in both academia and industry. And it is currently the most well-known streaming system globally (challenge me if you think I got it wrong!). - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Every Database Will Support Iceberg — Here's Why
    Apache Iceberg defines a table format that separates how data is stored from how data is queried. Any engine that implements the Iceberg integration — Spark, Flink, Trino, DuckDB, Snowflake, RisingWave — can read and/or write Iceberg data directly. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • RisingWave Turns Four: Our Journey Beyond Democratizing Stream Processing
    The last decade saw the rise of open-source frameworks like Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, and Apache Samza. These offered more flexibility but still demanded significant engineering muscle to run effectively at scale. Companies using them often needed specialized stream processing engineers just to manage internal state, tune performance, and handle the day-to-day operational challenges. The barrier to entry... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Twitter's 600-Tweet Daily Limit Crisis: Soaring GCP Costs and the Open Source Fix Elon Musk Ignored
    Apache Flink: Flink is a unified streaming and batching platform developed under the Apache Foundation. It provides support for Java API and a SQL interface. Flink boasts a large ecosystem and can seamlessly integrate with various services, including Kafka, Pulsar, HDFS, Iceberg, Hudi, and other systems. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
View more

Kibana mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Kibana yet. Tracking of Kibana recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache Flink and Kibana, you can also consider the following products

Apache Spark - Apache Spark is an engine for big data processing, with built-in modules for streaming, SQL, machine learning and graph processing.

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Spring Framework - The Spring Framework provides a comprehensive programming and configuration model for modern Java-based enterprise applications - on any kind of deployment platform.

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.

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

Splunk - Splunk's operational intelligence platform helps unearth intelligent insights from machine data.