Kiali vs Nagios

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Kiali

Stacks69

Followers76

Votes0

GitHub Stars0

Forks0

Kiali vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Differences between Kiali and Nagios

Kiali and Nagios are both open-source monitoring tools used for different purposes. While Kiali focuses on the observability of microservices-based applications, Nagios is more versatile and is widely used for infrastructure and network monitoring. Here are the key differences between Kiali and Nagios:

Scope: Kiali is primarily designed for monitoring and analyzing the performance of microservices within a Kubernetes environment. It provides detailed insights into the service mesh and allows users to visualize and troubleshoot microservice interactions. On the other hand, Nagios can be used to monitor a wide range of components, including network devices, servers, applications, and services, making it suitable for comprehensive infrastructure monitoring.
Data Collection: Kiali collects data from the service mesh and uses it to generate visualizations, graphs, and metrics. It focuses on extracting information related to the communication patterns, response times, error rates, and other metrics specific to microservices. Nagios, on the other hand, collects data through a variety of methods, including agent-based and agentless monitoring. It supports different protocols like SNMP, HTTP, and SSH to gather data from various infrastructure components.
Alerting and Notification: Kiali provides limited support for alerting and notification. It mainly relies on the integration with external tools or systems to notify users about critical issues. In contrast, Nagios offers extensive alerting and notification capabilities. It allows users to define and configure customized alerts based on specific thresholds or conditions. It can send notifications via various channels such as email, SMS, or even execute custom scripts.
Extensibility and Customization: Kiali offers a limited scope for customization and extension. It provides a predefined set of visualizations, metrics, and features specific to microservices monitoring. On the other hand, Nagios is highly customizable and extensible. Users can create custom plugins, monitor different components, define complex monitoring scenarios, and even integrate with third-party tools through its extensive plugin ecosystem.
Interface and User Experience: Kiali focuses on providing a user-friendly and intuitive interface specifically tailored for microservices monitoring. It offers interactive visualizations, topology graphs, and a streamlined user experience for monitoring microservice interactions. Nagios, on the other hand, has a more traditional interface that allows users to access and navigate through different monitoring components, hosts, and services. It provides detailed status information, event logs, and performance graphs.
Community and Support: Kiali, being a relatively newer tool, has a smaller user community and a growing ecosystem. Although it receives active contributions and updates, the community support might be comparatively limited. Nagios, on the other hand, has a long-established user base, a vast community, and extensive documentation. It benefits from a large number of plugins, addons, and community-developed solutions, making it easier to find support and solutions for specific monitoring needs.

In summary, Kiali is a specialized monitoring tool targeted towards microservices monitoring within a Kubernetes environment, providing detailed visualizations and metrics for service mesh observability. Nagios, on the other hand, is a versatile infrastructure monitoring tool capable of monitoring a wide range of components and offering extensive customization, alerting, and community support.

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Advice on Nagios, Kiali

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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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Nagios	Kiali
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	It is an observability console for Istio with service mesh configuration capabilities. It helps you to understand the structure of your service mesh by inferring the topology, and also provides the health of your mesh.
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	Weighted Routing Wizard; Matching Routing Wizard; Suspend Traffic Wizard; Advanced Options; More Wizard examples.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57	GitHub Stars 0
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks 0
Stacks 811	Stacks 69
Followers 1.1K	Followers 76
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
Integrations
No integrations available	Golang Elasticsearch Cassandra Akutan

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Kiali?

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).

Jaeger

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

Related Comparisons

Kiali vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Differences between Kiali and Nagios

Scope: Kiali is primarily designed for monitoring and analyzing the performance of microservices within a Kubernetes environment. It provides detailed insights into the service mesh and allows users to visualize and troubleshoot microservice interactions. On the other hand, Nagios can be used to monitor a wide range of components, including network devices, servers, applications, and services, making it suitable for comprehensive infrastructure monitoring.
Data Collection: Kiali collects data from the service mesh and uses it to generate visualizations, graphs, and metrics. It focuses on extracting information related to the communication patterns, response times, error rates, and other metrics specific to microservices. Nagios, on the other hand, collects data through a variety of methods, including agent-based and agentless monitoring. It supports different protocols like SNMP, HTTP, and SSH to gather data from various infrastructure components.
Alerting and Notification: Kiali provides limited support for alerting and notification. It mainly relies on the integration with external tools or systems to notify users about critical issues. In contrast, Nagios offers extensive alerting and notification capabilities. It allows users to define and configure customized alerts based on specific thresholds or conditions. It can send notifications via various channels such as email, SMS, or even execute custom scripts.
Extensibility and Customization: Kiali offers a limited scope for customization and extension. It provides a predefined set of visualizations, metrics, and features specific to microservices monitoring. On the other hand, Nagios is highly customizable and extensible. Users can create custom plugins, monitor different components, define complex monitoring scenarios, and even integrate with third-party tools through its extensive plugin ecosystem.
Interface and User Experience: Kiali focuses on providing a user-friendly and intuitive interface specifically tailored for microservices monitoring. It offers interactive visualizations, topology graphs, and a streamlined user experience for monitoring microservice interactions. Nagios, on the other hand, has a more traditional interface that allows users to access and navigate through different monitoring components, hosts, and services. It provides detailed status information, event logs, and performance graphs.
Community and Support: Kiali, being a relatively newer tool, has a smaller user community and a growing ecosystem. Although it receives active contributions and updates, the community support might be comparatively limited. Nagios, on the other hand, has a long-established user base, a vast community, and extensive documentation. It benefits from a large number of plugins, addons, and community-developed solutions, making it easier to find support and solutions for specific monitoring needs.

Kiali vs Nagios

Overview

Kiali vs Nagios: What are the differences?