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Centreon vs Checkmk: What are the differences?
Introduction
Centreon and Checkmk are two popular IT monitoring tools used by organizations to monitor their infrastructure and ensure its smooth functioning. While both tools serve a similar purpose, there are key differences between them.
Scalability: Centreon is known for its scalability and ability to monitor large infrastructures with thousands of devices. It offers distributed architecture and flexible deployment options, allowing organizations to scale their monitoring capabilities effectively. Checkmk, on the other hand, may face limitations in handling large-scale infrastructures, especially in its open-source version.
Ease of Use: Centreon provides a user-friendly web interface that simplifies the monitoring configuration process. It offers an intuitive graphical interface and drag-and-drop capabilities, making it easier for administrators to set up and manage monitoring rules. Checkmk, although powerful, may have a steeper learning curve due to its extensive configuration options and complex interface.
Event Correlation: Centreon offers built-in event correlation capabilities that help identify the root causes of issues by analyzing different events and their relationships. This feature allows administrators to prioritize incidents and take appropriate actions quickly, reducing downtime. Checkmk, while it provides event handling capabilities, may have limitations in terms of advanced event correlation and analysis.
Monitoring Flexibility: Centreon supports a wide range of monitoring methods, including SNMP, NRPE, and SSH. It also offers support for custom plugins, enabling organizations to monitor various types of devices and applications. Checkmk, similarly, supports multiple monitoring methods, but its focus is primarily on agent-based monitoring, which may limit its flexibility in certain scenarios.
Dashboard and Reporting: Centreon provides customizable dashboards and reporting features, allowing administrators to visualize and analyze monitoring data effectively. It provides real-time graphs, charts, and drill-down capabilities to explore performance metrics in detail. Checkmk, while it offers dashboard and reporting capabilities, may not provide the same level of customization and visualization options as Centreon.
Community and Support: Centreon has a strong and active community of users and developers who regularly contribute to its open-source ecosystem. This community provides valuable resources, plugins, and support for Centreon users. Checkmk also has a community edition; however, the support and community engagement may not be as extensive as in the case of Centreon.
In summary, Centreon offers scalability, ease of use, event correlation, monitoring flexibility, customizable dashboards, and a strong community support. Checkmk may have limitations in terms of scalability and complex configuration, but it excels in agent-based monitoring and offers advanced event handling capabilities.
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!
I work at Volvo Car Corporation as a consultant Project Manager. We have deployed Zabbix in all of our factories for factory monitoring because after thorough investigation we saw that Zabbix supports the wide variety of Operating Systems, hardware peripherals and devices a Car Manufacturer has.
No other tool had the same amount of support onboard for our production environment and we didn't want to end up using a different tool again for several areas. That is the major strong point about Zabbix and it's free of course. Another strong point is the documentation which is widely available; Zabbix Youtube channel with tutorial video's, Zabbix share which holds free templates, the Zabbix online documentation and the Zabbix forum also helped us out quite a bit. Deployment is quite easy since it uses templates, so almost all configuration can be done on server side.
To conclude, we are really pleased with the tool so far, it helped us detect several causes of issues that were a pain to solve in the past.
Centreon is part of the Nagios ecosystem, meaning there is a huge number of resources you may find around in the community (plugins, skills, addons). Zabbix monitoring paradigms are totally different from Centreon. Centreon plugins have some kind of intelligence when they are launched, where Zabbix monitoring rules are configured centrally with the raw data collected. Testing both will help you understand :) Users used to say Centreon may be faster for setup and deployment. And in the end, both are full of monitoring features. Centreon has out of the box a full catalog of probes from cloud to the edge https://www.centreon.com/en/plugins-pack-list/ As soon as you have defined your monitoring policies and template, you can deploy it fast through command line API or REST API. Centreon plays well in the ITSM, Automation, AIOps spaces with many connectors for Prometheus, ServiceNow, GLPI, Ansible, Chef, Splunk, ... The polling server mode is one of the differentiators with Centreon. You set up remote server(s) and chose btw multiple information-exchange mechanisms. Powerful and resilient for remote, VPN, DMZ, satellite networks. Centreon is a good value for price to do a data collection (availability, performance, fault) on a wide range of technologies (physical, legacy, cloud). There are pro support and enterprise version with dashboards and reporting. IT Central Station gathers many user feedback you can rely on both Centreon & Zabbix https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/centreon-reviews
We highly recommend Zabbix. We have used it to build our own monitoring product (available on cloud -like datadog- or on premise with support) because of its flexibility and extendability. It can be easily integrated with the powerful dashboarding and data aggregation of Grafana, so it is perfect. All configuration is done via web and templates, so it scales well and can be distributed via proxies. I think there also more companies providing consultancy in Zabbix (like ours) than Centreon and community is much wider. Also Zabbix roadmap and focus (compatibility with Elasticsearch, Prometheus, TimescaleDB) is really really good.
Hi Vivek, what's your stack? If huge monitoring bills are your concern and if you’re using a number of JVM languages, or mostly Scala / Akka, and would like “one tool to monitor them all”, Kamon might be the friendliest choice to go for.
Kamon APM’s major benefit is it comes with a built-in dashboard for the most important metrics to monitor, taking the pain of figuring out what to monitor and building your own dashboards for weeks out of the monitoring.
