Graylog vs Nagios

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Graylog

Stacks595

Followers711

Votes70

GitHub Stars7.9K

Forks1.1K

Graylog vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Introduction

Graylog and Nagios are both popular open-source monitoring tools used to monitor systems, applications, and networks. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences that set them apart. Below are the key differences between Graylog and Nagios.

Data Collection: Graylog focuses on centralized log management and data aggregation. It allows the collection of logs from various sources, such as servers, applications, and network devices, and provides powerful searching, filtering, and analysis capabilities. On the other hand, Nagios primarily focuses on monitoring system and network health by checking various services and resources like CPU, memory, disk space, and network connectivity.
Alerting and Notification: In Graylog, alerts can be created based on specific log events or conditions and can be forwarded to external systems or sent via various notification methods like email, SMS, and chat applications. Nagios, however, is renowned for its extensive alerting and notification capabilities. It can send alerts via email, SMS, instant messaging, or even execute custom scripts in response to critical events.
Visualization: Graylog provides rich visualization options for log data through customizable dashboards and widgets. It offers graphical representations, charts, and real-time monitoring of logs, which helps in analyzing trends and spotting anomalies. On the other hand, Nagios primarily uses text-based status information and simple web interfaces for displaying system health and monitoring results.
Scalability: Graylog is highly scalable and can handle a large volume of log data by distributing the workload across multiple nodes. It supports clustering and load balancing to ensure efficient log processing. Nagios, on the other hand, is designed for smaller environments and may experience limitations when dealing with a high number of hosts and services to monitor.
Plugins and Integrations: Graylog provides extensive support for plugins and integrations, allowing users to extend its functionality based on their specific requirements. It integrates well with various systems and tools like Elasticsearch, Kafka, Grafana, and more. Nagios also offers a wide range of plugins and integrations to extend its monitoring capabilities, making it highly flexible and adaptable to different environments.
Configuration and Ease of Use: Graylog offers a user-friendly web-based interface for configuration and management of log collection, filtering, and analysis. It provides a more intuitive and modern user experience. Nagios, on the other hand, has a more complex configuration process, typically performed through text-based configuration files. It requires a good understanding of its configuration syntax and may have a steeper learning curve for beginners.

In summary, Graylog specializes in log management and analysis with a focus on data collection, alerting, and visualization, while Nagios is primarily designed for system and network health monitoring with powerful alerting and notification capabilities. Graylog provides more flexibility in terms of scalability, plugins, and ease of use through its user-friendly interface, while Nagios offers a wider range of monitoring checks and may be more suitable for smaller environments.

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Advice on Nagios, Graylog

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	Graylog
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.
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 7.9K
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 811	Stacks 595
Followers 1.1K	Followers 711
Votes 102	Votes 70
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	Pros 19 Open source 13 Powerfull 8 Well documented 6 Alerts 5 User authentification Cons 1 Does not handle frozen indices at all
Integrations
No integrations available	GitHub

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Graylog?

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

Graylog vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Introduction

Data Collection: Graylog focuses on centralized log management and data aggregation. It allows the collection of logs from various sources, such as servers, applications, and network devices, and provides powerful searching, filtering, and analysis capabilities. On the other hand, Nagios primarily focuses on monitoring system and network health by checking various services and resources like CPU, memory, disk space, and network connectivity.
Alerting and Notification: In Graylog, alerts can be created based on specific log events or conditions and can be forwarded to external systems or sent via various notification methods like email, SMS, and chat applications. Nagios, however, is renowned for its extensive alerting and notification capabilities. It can send alerts via email, SMS, instant messaging, or even execute custom scripts in response to critical events.
Visualization: Graylog provides rich visualization options for log data through customizable dashboards and widgets. It offers graphical representations, charts, and real-time monitoring of logs, which helps in analyzing trends and spotting anomalies. On the other hand, Nagios primarily uses text-based status information and simple web interfaces for displaying system health and monitoring results.
Scalability: Graylog is highly scalable and can handle a large volume of log data by distributing the workload across multiple nodes. It supports clustering and load balancing to ensure efficient log processing. Nagios, on the other hand, is designed for smaller environments and may experience limitations when dealing with a high number of hosts and services to monitor.
Plugins and Integrations: Graylog provides extensive support for plugins and integrations, allowing users to extend its functionality based on their specific requirements. It integrates well with various systems and tools like Elasticsearch, Kafka, Grafana, and more. Nagios also offers a wide range of plugins and integrations to extend its monitoring capabilities, making it highly flexible and adaptable to different environments.
Configuration and Ease of Use: Graylog offers a user-friendly web-based interface for configuration and management of log collection, filtering, and analysis. It provides a more intuitive and modern user experience. Nagios, on the other hand, has a more complex configuration process, typically performed through text-based configuration files. It requires a good understanding of its configuration syntax and may have a steeper learning curve for beginners.

Graylog vs Nagios

Overview

Graylog vs Nagios: What are the differences?