ELK vs Icinga

Overview

Icinga

Stacks120

Followers97

Votes0

ELK

Stacks864

Followers941

Votes23

ELK vs Icinga: What are the differences?

Introduction

ELK and Icinga are both popular tools used in the field of monitoring and logging for IT infrastructure. While both serve essential roles in monitoring and managing systems, there are key differences that set them apart.

Data Analysis: ELK, which stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, is primarily focused on log data analysis and visualization. It is designed to collect, parse, store, and analyze log data in real-time. On the other hand, Icinga is more focused on monitoring and alerting for infrastructure and services, checking the status and health of various components.
Alerting Mechanisms: In terms of alerting mechanisms, Icinga provides sophisticated alerting features, allowing users to configure alerts based on various criteria such as thresholds, schedules, and dependencies. ELK, on the other hand, lacks built-in alerting capabilities and often requires additional plugins or integrations to set up alerting functionalities.
Scalability: ELK is highly scalable and can handle vast amounts of log data efficiently, making it suitable for large enterprises with complex logging requirements. On the contrary, Icinga is more focused on monitoring specific components and services within an infrastructure, making it a better fit for organizations that do not require extensive log data analysis.
Ease of Use: ELK can be challenging to set up and configure, especially for users without a background in data analysis or system administration. In contrast, Icinga offers a more straightforward setup process and user-friendly interfaces, making it accessible to users with varying levels of technical expertise.
Community Support: Both ELK and Icinga have active communities that provide support, documentation, and plugins/extensions. However, ELK's community is larger and more diverse, offering a wider range of resources and community-contributed content compared to Icinga.

In Summary, ELK focuses on log data analysis and visualization with scalability for large enterprises, while Icinga is more centered on monitoring infrastructure and services with advanced alerting mechanisms and ease of use.

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Advice on Icinga, ELK

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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Detailed Comparison

Icinga	ELK
It monitors availability and performance, gives you simple access to relevant data and raises alerts to keep you in the loop. It was originally created as a fork of the Nagios system monitoring application.	It is the acronym for three open source projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine. Logstash is a server‑side data processing pipeline that ingests data from multiple sources simultaneously, transforms it, and then sends it to a "stash" like Elasticsearch. Kibana lets users visualize data with charts and graphs in Elasticsearch.
Statistics
Stacks 120	Stacks 864
Followers 97	Followers 941
Votes 0	Votes 23
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet	Pros 14 Open source 4 Can run locally 3 Good for startups with monetary limitations 1 External Network Goes Down You Aren't Without Logging 1 Easy to setup Cons 5 Elastic Search is a resource hog 3 Logstash configuration is a pain 1 Bad for startups with personal limitations

What are some alternatives to Icinga, ELK?

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.

Papertrail

Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.

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.

Logmatic

Get a clear overview of what is happening across your distributed environments, and spot the needle in the haystack in no time. Build dynamic analyses and identify improvements for your software, your user experience and your business.

Loggly

It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.

Logentries

Logentries makes machine-generated log data easily accessible to IT operations, development, and business analysis teams of all sizes. With the broadest platform support and an open API, Logentries brings the value of log-level data to any system, to any team member, and to a community of more than 25,000 worldwide users.

Logstash

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

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

Related Comparisons

ELK vs Icinga: What are the differences?

Introduction

Data Analysis: ELK, which stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, is primarily focused on log data analysis and visualization. It is designed to collect, parse, store, and analyze log data in real-time. On the other hand, Icinga is more focused on monitoring and alerting for infrastructure and services, checking the status and health of various components.
Alerting Mechanisms: In terms of alerting mechanisms, Icinga provides sophisticated alerting features, allowing users to configure alerts based on various criteria such as thresholds, schedules, and dependencies. ELK, on the other hand, lacks built-in alerting capabilities and often requires additional plugins or integrations to set up alerting functionalities.
Scalability: ELK is highly scalable and can handle vast amounts of log data efficiently, making it suitable for large enterprises with complex logging requirements. On the contrary, Icinga is more focused on monitoring specific components and services within an infrastructure, making it a better fit for organizations that do not require extensive log data analysis.
Ease of Use: ELK can be challenging to set up and configure, especially for users without a background in data analysis or system administration. In contrast, Icinga offers a more straightforward setup process and user-friendly interfaces, making it accessible to users with varying levels of technical expertise.
Community Support: Both ELK and Icinga have active communities that provide support, documentation, and plugins/extensions. However, ELK's community is larger and more diverse, offering a wider range of resources and community-contributed content compared to Icinga.

ELK vs Icinga

Overview

ELK vs Icinga: What are the differences?