Overview

Nagios

Stacks828

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Ganglia

Stacks28

Followers88

Votes0

Ganglia vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Introduction

Ganglia and Nagios are both popular monitoring tools used in the IT industry. While they both serve the purpose of monitoring systems and network resources, they have key differences that set them apart from each other.

Architecture: Ganglia is designed with a decentralized architecture, where individual nodes collect data and send it to a central database for storage and analysis. On the other hand, Nagios follows a centralized architecture, where a central server actively polls remote hosts to collect data and perform checks.
Scope of Monitoring: Ganglia primarily focuses on cluster and grid computing environments, making it suitable for monitoring large-scale systems with a high number of interconnected nodes. Nagios, on the other hand, is more versatile and can monitor various IT infrastructure components, including networks, servers, applications, and services.
Data Visualization: Ganglia provides a visually appealing and intuitive graphical representation of data using line graphs, stacked graphs, and heatmaps. It allows users to easily analyze trends, patterns, and correlations. Nagios, on the other hand, offers a more text-based and customizable visual representation, which may require more expertise to interpret and analyze.
Alerting and Notification: Nagios is well-known for its robust alerting and notification system. It allows users to set up complex alert conditions based on various parameters and send notifications via email, SMS, or other methods. Ganglia, on the other hand, does not include built-in alerting and notification features. However, it can be integrated with other tools or scripts to achieve similar functionality.
Plugin Ecosystem: Nagios has a wide range of third-party plugins available, allowing users to extend its functionality and monitor specific applications, devices, or protocols. This extensive plugin ecosystem makes Nagios highly customizable and adaptable to various monitoring requirements. Ganglia, on the other hand, has a more limited plugin ecosystem, offering fewer options for extending its core capabilities.
Resource Consumption: Ganglia has a lightweight footprint compared to Nagios, making it more suitable for monitoring resource-constrained environments or systems with a large number of nodes. Nagios, being a more feature-rich and centralized tool, may consume more system resources, especially when monitoring a large number of hosts.

In summary, Ganglia and Nagios differ in their architecture, monitoring scope, data visualization, alerting capabilities, plugin ecosystem, and resource consumption. Ganglia is best suited for cluster and grid computing environments, while Nagios is a versatile tool capable of monitoring various IT infrastructure components.

Advice on Nagios, Ganglia

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

Nagios	Ganglia
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	It is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters.
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	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 828	Stacks 28
Followers 1.1K	Followers 88
Votes 102	Votes 0
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	No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Ganglia?

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

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

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).