StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Monitoring Tools
  5. Kibana vs Nagios vs Prometheus

Kibana vs Nagios vs Prometheus

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Nagios
Nagios
Stacks811
Followers1.1K
Votes102
GitHub Stars57
Forks38
Kibana
Kibana
Stacks20.6K
Followers16.4K
Votes262
GitHub Stars20.8K
Forks8.5K
Prometheus
Prometheus
Stacks4.8K
Followers3.8K
Votes239
GitHub Stars61.1K
Forks9.9K

Kibana vs Nagios vs Prometheus: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Kibana, Nagios, and Prometheus are all popular monitoring tools used in the IT industry. While they serve a similar purpose, each tool has its specific features and differences that cater to different monitoring needs.

1. **Data Visualization**:
Kibana specializes in data visualization, offering rich graphical presentations of data stored in Elasticsearch, making it ideal for real-time data analysis and visualization.

2. **Alerting Capabilities**:
Nagios is known for its robust alerting system, which allows users to set up and receive alerts based on predefined thresholds, ensuring timely responses to critical issues in the IT environment.

3. **Data Collection**:
Prometheus stands out in its ability to collect data using a pull model, scraping metrics from monitored targets, making it capable of handling dynamic environments and services.

4. **Monitoring Approach**:
Nagios follows a traditional monitoring approach, primarily focusing on server and network monitoring, whereas Prometheus is geared towards microservices and containerized environments, providing visibility into complex ecosystems.

5. **Scalability**:
While Nagios may face scalability challenges in large and dynamic environments, Prometheus is highly scalable and efficient due to its distributed architecture, enabling seamless monitoring of thousands of targets.

6. **Integration Capabilities**:
Kibana offers seamless integration with the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack, making it a preferred choice for organizations already using the ELK stack for log management and analysis.

In Summary, Kibana excels at data visualization, Nagios is strong in alerting capabilities, and Prometheus is tailored for dynamic environments with its pull-based data collection method and scalability.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Nagios, Kibana, Prometheus

Matt
Matt

Senior Software Engineering Manager at PayIt

May 3, 2021

DecidedonGrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheusKubernetesKubernetes

Grafana and Prometheus together, running on Kubernetes , is a powerful combination. These tools are cloud-native and offer a large community and easy integrations. At PayIt we're using exporting Java application metrics using a Dropwizard metrics exporter, and our Node.js services now use the prom-client npm library to serve metrics.

1.1M views1.1M
Comments
Raja Subramaniam
Raja Subramaniam

Aug 27, 2019

Needs adviceonPrometheusPrometheusKubernetesKubernetesSysdigSysdig

We have Prometheus as a monitoring engine as a part of our stack which contains Kubernetes cluster, container images and other open source tools. Also, I am aware that Sysdig can be integrated with Prometheus but I really wanted to know whether Sysdig or sysdig+prometheus will make better monitoring solution.

779k views779k
Comments
StackShare
StackShare

Jun 25, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: “We need better analytics & insights into our Elasticsearch cluster. Grafana, which ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch, looks great but isn’t officially supported/endorsed by Elastic. Kibana, on the other hand, is made and supported by Elastic. I’m wondering what people suggest in this situation."

663k views663k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Nagios
Nagios
Kibana
Kibana
Prometheus
Prometheus

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

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 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.

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
Flexible analytics and visualization platform;Real-time summary and charting of streaming data;Intuitive interface for a variety of users;Instant sharing and embedding of dashboards
Dimensional data; Powerful queries; Great visualization; Efficient storage; Precise alerting; Simple operation
Statistics
GitHub Stars
57
GitHub Stars
20.8K
GitHub Stars
61.1K
GitHub Forks
38
GitHub Forks
8.5K
GitHub Forks
9.9K
Stacks
811
Stacks
20.6K
Stacks
4.8K
Followers
1.1K
Followers
16.4K
Followers
3.8K
Votes
102
Votes
262
Votes
239
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
  • 88
    Easy to setup
  • 65
    Free
  • 45
    Can search text
  • 21
    Has pie chart
  • 13
    X-axis is not restricted to timestamp
Cons
  • 7
    Unintuituve
  • 4
    Works on top of elastic only
  • 4
    Elasticsearch is huge
  • 3
    Hardweight UI
Pros
  • 47
    Powerful easy to use monitoring
  • 38
    Flexible query language
  • 32
    Dimensional data model
  • 27
    Alerts
  • 23
    Active and responsive community
Cons
  • 12
    Just for metrics
  • 6
    Bad UI
  • 6
    Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints
  • 4
    Not easy to configure and use
  • 3
    Supports only active agents
Integrations
No integrations available
Logstash
Logstash
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch
Beats
Beats
Grafana
Grafana

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Kibana, Prometheus?

Grafana

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.

Netdata

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

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

Sensu

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

Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

Lumigo

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

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

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

Telegraf

Telegraf

It is an agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics. Design goals are to have a minimal memory footprint with a plugin system so that developers in the community can easily add support for collecting metrics.

Sysdig

Sysdig

Sysdig is open source, system-level exploration: capture system state and activity from a running Linux instance, then save, filter and analyze. Sysdig is scriptable in Lua and includes a command line interface and a powerful interactive UI, csysdig, that runs in your terminal. Think of sysdig as strace + tcpdump + htop + iftop + lsof + awesome sauce. With state of the art container visibility on top.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana