Analysis methods vary depending on use case, the tools used and of course the data itself, but the step of visualizing the data, whether logs, metrics or traces, is now considered a standard best practice. Visualizing data helps teams monitor their environment, detect patterns and take action when identifying anomalous behavior. In case of diagnostics and after-the-fact root cause analysis, visualizing data provides visibility required for understanding what transpired at a given point in time.
The key difference between the two visualization tools stems from their purpose. Grafana is designed for analyzing and visualizing metrics such as system CPU, memory, disk and I/O utilization. Grafana does not allow full-text data querying. Kibana, on the other hand, runs on top of Elasticsearch and is used primarily for analyzing log messages.
Grafana has released Loki, a solution meant to complement the main tool in order to better parse, visualize and analyze logging. Grafana works well together with a time-series database such as Graphite or InfluxDB is a combination used for metrics analysis, whereas Kibana is part of the popular ELK Stack, used for exploring log data.
