Tools/Kibana
Kibana
Visualization and dashboarding layer of the ELK/Elastic Stack — queries Elasticsearch to build log/metric dashboards, saved searches, and alerts. The direct open-source alternative is Grafana, which plays the same visualization role over Loki (logs) and Prometheus (metrics) instead of Elasticsearch. Swapping the whole ELK triplet (Elasticsearch + Logstash/Filebeat + Kibana) for the PLG stack (Promtail + Loki + Grafana) trades Elasticsearch's full-text indexing for Loki's much lighter label-only indexing — the right call when dashboards/label-filtered log search is enough and full-text search across log bodies isn't a hard requirement.