Nagios vs Zabbix

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Zabbix

Stacks684

Followers981

Votes66

GitHub Stars5.3K

Forks1.1K

Nagios vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Introduction

Nagios and Zabbix are two popular open-source network monitoring tools that help organizations in ensuring the availability and performance of their IT infrastructure. However, there are several key differences between the two that are worth exploring.

Architecture: Nagios follows a traditional client-server architecture, where monitoring agents are installed on the target hosts and report data to a central Nagios server. In contrast, Zabbix implements a distributed architecture with a centralized server and optional proxies, allowing for scalability and load distribution.
Ease of Use: While Nagios has a steeper learning curve with its configuration file-based approach, Zabbix offers a more user-friendly interface and simplified configuration process. Zabbix also provides pre-configured templates for popular systems and applications, making it easier to get started.
Autodiscovery: Zabbix has built-in support for autodiscovery, which means it can automatically discover and monitor new devices or services added to the network. Nagios, on the other hand, requires manual configuration for each monitored device.
Templates and Triggers: Zabbix offers a flexible template system that allows users to define monitoring rules and thresholds. It also provides predefined triggers that simplify the process of setting up alerts. Nagios, although customizable, requires more manual configuration for setting up monitoring and alerting rules.
Scalability: Zabbix is known for its scalability, supporting large-scale deployments with thousands of monitored devices. Nagios, while capable of monitoring a significant number of hosts, can face challenges when dealing with larger environments due to its client-server architecture.
Visualization and Reporting: Zabbix provides built-in data visualization and reporting capabilities. It offers various types of graphs and reports for monitoring data analysis. Nagios, on the other hand, requires additional plugins or integrations to achieve similar visualization and reporting functionalities.

In summary, Zabbix differentiates itself from Nagios with its distributed architecture, easier user interface, autodiscovery capabilities, flexible templates and triggers, scalability for larger deployments, and built-in visualization and reporting features.

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Advice on Nagios, Zabbix

vivek

Jun 8, 2020

Needs adviceon

Centreon

Zabbix

Datadog

My team is divided on using Centreon or Zabbix for enterprise monitoring and alert automation. Can someone let us know which one is better? There is one more tool called Datadog that we are using for cloud assets. Of course, Datadog presents us with huge bills. So we want to have a comparative study. Suggestions and advice are welcome. Thanks!

795k views795k

Comments

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	Zabbix
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.
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	Smart, Highly Automated Metric Collection; Advanced Problem Detection; Intelligent Alerting and Remediation
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57	GitHub Stars 5.3K
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 811	Stacks 684
Followers 1.1K	Followers 981
Votes 102	Votes 66
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	Pros 21 Free 9 Alerts 5 Templates 5 Service/node/network discovery 4 Base metrics from the box Cons 5 The UI is in PHP 2 Puppet module is sluggish
Integrations
No integrations available	Slack Jira PagerDuty Grafana Ansible Skype Chef Bugzilla HipChat ServiceNow.com

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Zabbix?

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.

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

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Graphite

Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

StatsD

It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

Jaeger

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

Telegraf

It is an agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics. Design goals are to have a minimal memory footprint with a plugin system so that developers in the community can easily add support for collecting metrics.

Related Comparisons

Nagios vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Introduction

Architecture: Nagios follows a traditional client-server architecture, where monitoring agents are installed on the target hosts and report data to a central Nagios server. In contrast, Zabbix implements a distributed architecture with a centralized server and optional proxies, allowing for scalability and load distribution.
Ease of Use: While Nagios has a steeper learning curve with its configuration file-based approach, Zabbix offers a more user-friendly interface and simplified configuration process. Zabbix also provides pre-configured templates for popular systems and applications, making it easier to get started.
Autodiscovery: Zabbix has built-in support for autodiscovery, which means it can automatically discover and monitor new devices or services added to the network. Nagios, on the other hand, requires manual configuration for each monitored device.
Templates and Triggers: Zabbix offers a flexible template system that allows users to define monitoring rules and thresholds. It also provides predefined triggers that simplify the process of setting up alerts. Nagios, although customizable, requires more manual configuration for setting up monitoring and alerting rules.
Scalability: Zabbix is known for its scalability, supporting large-scale deployments with thousands of monitored devices. Nagios, while capable of monitoring a significant number of hosts, can face challenges when dealing with larger environments due to its client-server architecture.
Visualization and Reporting: Zabbix provides built-in data visualization and reporting capabilities. It offers various types of graphs and reports for monitoring data analysis. Nagios, on the other hand, requires additional plugins or integrations to achieve similar visualization and reporting functionalities.

Nagios vs Zabbix

Overview