Munin vs Nagios

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Munin

Stacks71

Followers95

Votes10

GitHub Stars2.1K

Forks479

Munin vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Munin and Nagios are both popular open-source monitoring systems used to monitor and manage various aspects of a network environment, including servers, applications, and network devices. While they share some similarities, there are distinct differences between the two.

Scalability: Munin uses a decentralized graph-based architecture, where each node within the network independently collects and stores data. This distributed approach allows for a high level of scalability, making it suitable for large and complex environments. On the other hand, Nagios follows a centralized model, where a central server collects and processes data from all monitored devices. This centralized approach makes Nagios more suitable for smaller and less complex networks.
Monitoring Abilities: Munin primarily focuses on resource monitoring, providing detailed data on system resources such as CPU, memory, disk usage, and network activity. It offers a wide range of pre-configured plugins for monitoring various services and applications. In contrast, Nagios offers a broader spectrum of monitoring capabilities, including not only resource monitoring but also network services, applications, and server performance. It can also perform active checks to detect issues and send notifications.
Ease of Configuration: Munin is often praised for its simplicity and ease of configuration. It automatically discovers resources on the network and generates graphs without requiring extensive manual configuration. The configuration process involves adding nodes to the monitoring system and installing the Munin agent on those nodes. On the other hand, Nagios has a more complex configuration process. It requires defining hosts, services, and dependencies in configuration files. While this level of customization offers flexibility, it also requires a higher level of technical expertise and effort to set up.
Graphical Representation: Munin has a strong emphasis on graphical representation and offers an extensive collection of visually appealing graphs and charts. It provides historical data analysis and trend monitoring through its web interface. Nagios, on the other hand, primarily focuses on status information and alerts. It presents information in a more text-based and tabular format, making it easier to quickly scan through alerts and identify issues.
Notification System: Nagios boasts a powerful and flexible notification system. It allows administrators to define various notification methods, such as email, SMS, and custom scripts, based on the severity and type of issues detected. Nagios also supports escalations, meaning notifications can be sent to different individuals or groups based on the duration of the problem. Munin, on the other hand, lacks a built-in notification system. However, it can be integrated with external systems or scripts to set up notifications.
Community and Ecosystem: Nagios has a larger and more established community compared to Munin. It has been around for a longer time and has a wealth of documentation, plugins, and community support available. Munin, while having an active community, may not have as extensive plugin support or a wide range of resources available.

In Summary, Munin and Nagios differ in terms of scalability, monitoring abilities, ease of configuration, graphical representation, notification system, and community support. Munin is known for its simplicity, decentralized architecture, and focus on resource monitoring, while Nagios offers broader monitoring capabilities, a powerful notification system, and an established ecosystem.

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Advice on Nagios, Munin

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	Munin
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and "what just happened to kill our performance?" problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.
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 2.1K
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks 479
Stacks 811	Stacks 71
Followers 1.1K	Followers 95
Votes 102	Votes 10
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 3 Good defaults 2 Alerts can trigger any command line program 2 Adheres to traditional Linux standards 2 Extremely fast to install 1 Easy to write custom plugins

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Munin?

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

Munin vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Scalability: Munin uses a decentralized graph-based architecture, where each node within the network independently collects and stores data. This distributed approach allows for a high level of scalability, making it suitable for large and complex environments. On the other hand, Nagios follows a centralized model, where a central server collects and processes data from all monitored devices. This centralized approach makes Nagios more suitable for smaller and less complex networks.
Monitoring Abilities: Munin primarily focuses on resource monitoring, providing detailed data on system resources such as CPU, memory, disk usage, and network activity. It offers a wide range of pre-configured plugins for monitoring various services and applications. In contrast, Nagios offers a broader spectrum of monitoring capabilities, including not only resource monitoring but also network services, applications, and server performance. It can also perform active checks to detect issues and send notifications.
Ease of Configuration: Munin is often praised for its simplicity and ease of configuration. It automatically discovers resources on the network and generates graphs without requiring extensive manual configuration. The configuration process involves adding nodes to the monitoring system and installing the Munin agent on those nodes. On the other hand, Nagios has a more complex configuration process. It requires defining hosts, services, and dependencies in configuration files. While this level of customization offers flexibility, it also requires a higher level of technical expertise and effort to set up.
Graphical Representation: Munin has a strong emphasis on graphical representation and offers an extensive collection of visually appealing graphs and charts. It provides historical data analysis and trend monitoring through its web interface. Nagios, on the other hand, primarily focuses on status information and alerts. It presents information in a more text-based and tabular format, making it easier to quickly scan through alerts and identify issues.
Notification System: Nagios boasts a powerful and flexible notification system. It allows administrators to define various notification methods, such as email, SMS, and custom scripts, based on the severity and type of issues detected. Nagios also supports escalations, meaning notifications can be sent to different individuals or groups based on the duration of the problem. Munin, on the other hand, lacks a built-in notification system. However, it can be integrated with external systems or scripts to set up notifications.
Community and Ecosystem: Nagios has a larger and more established community compared to Munin. It has been around for a longer time and has a wealth of documentation, plugins, and community support available. Munin, while having an active community, may not have as extensive plugin support or a wide range of resources available.

Munin vs Nagios

Overview