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Centreon vs Shinken: What are the differences?
Introduction
Centreon and Shinken are both popular network monitoring solutions. While they serve the same purpose of monitoring network infrastructure, there are key differences between the two.
Scalability: Centreon offers a highly scalable solution that can handle monitoring of thousands of hosts and services. On the other hand, Shinken is designed for massive scalability, capable of monitoring tens of thousands of hosts and services without compromising performance.
Architecture: Centreon follows a centralized architecture, where all monitoring agents report back to a central server. In contrast, Shinken follows a distributed architecture where monitoring is done by a set of distributed processes working together in a coordinated manner.
Flexibility: Centreon provides a user-friendly web interface for configuration and management. It has a wide range of pre-packaged monitoring plugins. Shinken, on the other hand, offers more flexibility through its Python-based configuration and extensibility, allowing for customization and integration with other tools.
High Availability: Centreon has built-in high availability features, including active-passive failover clustering. Shinken, on the other hand, has a more advanced high availability mechanism with support for active-active failover through distributed monitoring and load balancing.
Event Handling: Centreon focuses on real-time monitoring and integrates event handling with third-party tools such as ticketing systems and notification platforms. Shinken has a built-in event handler with more advanced features like automatic event correlation and triggering of actions based on predefined rules.
Community and Support: Centreon has a larger user community and commercial support available with enterprise-level features. Shinken, being an open-source project, relies more on community support for assistance, but still has an active user base and development community.
In summary, Centreon and Shinken differ in scalability, architecture, flexibility, high availability, event handling, and community/support.
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.