Nagios vs OpenCensus

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

OpenCensus

Stacks644

Followers21

Votes0

Nagios vs OpenCensus: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Nagios and OpenCensus

Purpose: Nagios is a monitoring tool focused on system, network, and infrastructure monitoring, allowing users to track network services, host resources, and application health. On the other hand, OpenCensus is primarily used for application performance monitoring and distributed tracing, helping developers understand the performance and behavior of their applications in a distributed environment.
Flexibility: Nagios operates mostly based on predefined monitoring checks and configurations, offering less flexibility in terms of customization and extensibility. In contrast, OpenCensus provides a more flexible approach by offering support for multiple programming languages, libraries, and integrations, allowing developers to instrument any part of their codebase for observability.
Data Collection: Nagios collects data based on configured checks and plugins, focusing on specific metrics and thresholds determined beforehand. In contrast, OpenCensus collects a wider range of telemetry data, including traces, metrics, and logs, providing a more comprehensive view of application behavior and performance.
Community Support: Nagios has a robust community with a long history of contributions and support, resulting in a wide range of plugins and extensions available for users. OpenCensus, being a more recent project, is backed by major tech companies like Google and provides strong community support with active development and continuous improvement.
Scalability: Nagios may face challenges in scaling to handle a large number of monitored resources and systems efficiently, especially in distributed and cloud-native environments. OpenCensus, designed with scalability in mind, can easily scale to support high-throughput applications and complex distributed systems, making it well-suited for modern cloud-based architectures.
Integration: Nagios typically requires additional tools or plugins for integration with various cloud services, databases, and platforms, adding complexity to the monitoring setup. Conversely, OpenCensus offers seamless integrations with cloud providers, container orchestrators, and other services, simplifying the process of collecting telemetry data from diverse sources.

In Summary, Nagios is a robust system monitoring tool with extensive community support, while OpenCensus is a flexible application performance monitoring solution designed for modern distributed environments.

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Advice on Nagios, OpenCensus

Matthias

Teamlead IT at NanoTemper Technologies

Jun 11, 2020

Decided

free open source
modern interface and architecture
large community
extendable I knew Nagios for decades but it was really outdated (by its architecture) at some point. That's why Icinga started first as a fork, not with Icinga2 it is completely built from scratch but backward-compatible with Nagios plugins. Now it has reached a state with which I am confident.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Nagios	OpenCensus
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	It is a set of libraries for various languages that allow you to collect application metrics and distributed traces, then transfer the data to a backend of your choice in real time. This data can be analyzed by developers and admins to understand the health of the application and debug problems.
Monitor your entire IT infrastructure;Spot problems before they occur;Know immediately when problems arise;Share availability data with stakeholders;Detect security breaches;Plan and budget for IT upgrades;Reduce downtime and business losses	Standard wire protocols; Consistent APIs for handling trace and metric data
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 811	Stacks 644
Followers 1.1K	Followers 21
Votes 102	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 53 It just works 28 The standard 12 Customizable 8 The Most flexible monitoring system 1 Huge stack of free checks/plugins to choose from	No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available	Prometheus Stackdriver Datadog SignalFx Zipkin LightStep Jaeger Wavefront Solarwinds Postmates API

What are some alternatives to Nagios, OpenCensus?

New Relic

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Datadog

Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!

Grafana

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Raygun

Raygun gives you a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications. Detect, diagnose and resolve issues that are affecting end users with greater speed and accuracy.

AppSignal

AppSignal gives you and your team alerts and detailed metrics about your Ruby, Node.js or Elixir application. Sensible pricing, no aggressive sales & support by developers.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

AppDynamics

AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics.

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Related Comparisons

Nagios vs OpenCensus: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Nagios and OpenCensus

Purpose: Nagios is a monitoring tool focused on system, network, and infrastructure monitoring, allowing users to track network services, host resources, and application health. On the other hand, OpenCensus is primarily used for application performance monitoring and distributed tracing, helping developers understand the performance and behavior of their applications in a distributed environment.
Flexibility: Nagios operates mostly based on predefined monitoring checks and configurations, offering less flexibility in terms of customization and extensibility. In contrast, OpenCensus provides a more flexible approach by offering support for multiple programming languages, libraries, and integrations, allowing developers to instrument any part of their codebase for observability.
Data Collection: Nagios collects data based on configured checks and plugins, focusing on specific metrics and thresholds determined beforehand. In contrast, OpenCensus collects a wider range of telemetry data, including traces, metrics, and logs, providing a more comprehensive view of application behavior and performance.
Community Support: Nagios has a robust community with a long history of contributions and support, resulting in a wide range of plugins and extensions available for users. OpenCensus, being a more recent project, is backed by major tech companies like Google and provides strong community support with active development and continuous improvement.
Scalability: Nagios may face challenges in scaling to handle a large number of monitored resources and systems efficiently, especially in distributed and cloud-native environments. OpenCensus, designed with scalability in mind, can easily scale to support high-throughput applications and complex distributed systems, making it well-suited for modern cloud-based architectures.
Integration: Nagios typically requires additional tools or plugins for integration with various cloud services, databases, and platforms, adding complexity to the monitoring setup. Conversely, OpenCensus offers seamless integrations with cloud providers, container orchestrators, and other services, simplifying the process of collecting telemetry data from diverse sources.

Nagios vs OpenCensus

Overview