Use cases where graphite should be use in addition or instead of ELK

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

We are evaluating elasticsearch for logging and there are many use cases where it's a perfect match. The question is should we also consider something like graphite for simple metrics (number of logins, visitors, response time, etc.)

It seems that graphite stores the data more compactly and I've seen people say the graphing is better in graphite. But it seems there might be an advantage in having all the metrics in one tool.

I'm curious what people here think and do? Do you also install graphite for these kinds of metrics or do everything with ELK?

2

We use both and find value in both.
There is an overlap and that's been a good thing in our experience.

Some items that we log we'd also like as metrics and some metrics we'd like to have as log of the event with extra details We're still exploring the overlap and pros-and-cons but I've not given much time to trying to work out the issues or define some kind of 'best practice' as what we have is good enough.

One observation I'd make is that we keep our logs for only 30 days but have graphite data going back many months.

I'd be happy to hear from people who have explored the balance between logs and metrics in more depth.