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Centreon vs Icinga: What are the differences?
Introduction:
Centreon and Icinga are both popular open-source monitoring tools used to monitor IT infrastructure in real time. While they share a similar purpose, there are several key differences between them.
Architecture: Centreon is based on a unified architecture, where all monitoring tasks are performed by a central server. On the other hand, Icinga follows a distributed architecture, allowing monitoring tasks to be distributed among multiple nodes. This makes Icinga more scalable and suitable for large-scale deployments.
Interface and User Experience: Centreon provides a web-based interface that is known for its user-friendly and intuitive design. It offers a comprehensive dashboard with detailed graphs and reports. In contrast, Icinga has a more minimalistic interface and focuses on providing essential monitoring features without compromising on performance. Icinga's interface is often preferred by experienced users who prioritize flexibility and customizability.
Configuration: Centreon features a graphical configuration tool that allows users to easily set up monitoring checks, thresholds, and notifications. It offers a drag-and-drop interface, making it accessible for users with limited technical skills. On the other hand, Icinga uses a configuration file-based approach, where all the monitoring objects and settings are defined using plain text files. This provides more flexibility and version control capabilities but requires a higher level of technical expertise.
Compatibility: Centreon is built on top of the Nagios Core monitoring engine, which means it is compatible with Nagios plugins and extensions. This enables users to leverage the vast Nagios ecosystem. Icinga, on the other hand, is a Nagios fork that aims to improve its shortcomings. It is also compatible with Nagios plugins but offers its own native plugins and extensions, expanding its functionality beyond Nagios.
Development and Community: Centreon is backed by a commercial company that provides professional support and services. It has an active and dedicated community that continuously contributes to its development and provides updates and bug fixes. Icinga, on the other hand, is a community-driven project with a strong emphasis on open-source collaboration. It is maintained by a group of passionate volunteers and has a vibrant community that actively contributes to its development.
Notification and Alerting: Both Centreon and Icinga provide comprehensive notification and alerting capabilities. However, Centreon offers a wider range of notification methods, including email, SMS, and SNMP traps. It also provides more advanced features like escalations, on-call rotations, and downtime scheduling. Icinga, on the other hand, focuses on simplicity and provides a straightforward notification system, primarily based on email alerts.
In Summary, Centreon and Icinga differ in architecture, interface, configuration methods, compatibility, development style, and notification capabilities. While Centreon offers a user-friendly interface and graphical configuration tools, Icinga provides a more scalable architecture, greater flexibility in configuration, and a vibrant community-driven development.
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.
- 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.
