Fluentd + Kibana – Collect Everything, See Everything
Why Use These Two Together
A lot of systems generate logs. Some generate too much. The problem isn’t getting the logs — it’s making sense of them. That’s where Fluentd and Kibana come in.
Fluentd is the collector — flexible, scriptable, plugin-based. It structures and forwards logs from just about anywhere.
Kibana is the interface — it turns those logs into dashboards, queries, and alerts.
Used together, they turn noisy data into something you can actually work with.
Fluentd – The Quiet Workhorse
Fluentd is a versatile log router. It runs as an agent or sidecar, pulls in logs, cleans them up, and forwards them downstream. It works equally well on bare metal, in Kubernetes, or inside containers.
| Attribute | Description |
| Platform | Linux, Windows, Kubernetes, Docker |
| Language | Written in C and Ruby |
| Input Sources | Files, journald, syslog, API, Docker, Kubernetes |
| Output Targets | Elasticsearch, S3, MongoDB, Kafka, HTTP, custom scripts |
| Plugin System | 500+ plugins for input, output, filters, buffers |
| Buffering | Supports memory/disk buffers with retry policies |
| Data Formats | JSON, CSV, syslog, LTSV, multiline plain text |
| Deployment Options | Standalone agent, daemonset, container, systemd service |
| License | Apache 2.0 |
| Website | https://www.fluentd.org |
Kibana – Make Logs Human
Kibana is the frontend that makes structured logs readable. Connected to Elasticsearch, it gives you dashboards, searches, filters, and visual queries in real time.
| Attribute | Description |
| Platform | Linux, Windows, macOS (web interface only) |
| Data Backend | Elasticsearch |
| Visualization | Line/bar charts, maps, pie graphs, tables, timelines |
| Query Language | Kibana Query Language (KQL), Lucene syntax |
| Dashboards | Save and share pre-built views |
| Alerting | Scheduled queries, threshold-based alerts, integrations |
| Security | Role-based access via Elastic Stack |
| Integration | Works with Fluentd, Beats, Logstash, Metricbeat, etc. |
| License | Elastic License / OpenSearch variant available |
| Website | https://www.elastic.co/kibana |
Why They Work Better Together
– Fluentd knows how to gather and clean messy logs
– Kibana knows how to visualize and explore that data
– Together, they give you an end-to-end solution — from noisy servers to clean dashboards
Whether it’s monitoring 10 containers or 1000 VMs, this combo scales, adapts, and keeps logs understandable.
