Nagios vs NetData

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Netdata

Stacks226

Followers392

Votes82

Nagios vs NetData: What are the differences?

Key Differences Between Nagios and NetData

Nagios and NetData are both popular monitoring tools used in IT infrastructure management. However, they have distinct differences that make them suitable for different use cases. Below are the key differences between Nagios and NetData:

Architecture and Purpose: Nagios is an open-source monitoring system that uses a client-server architecture. It primarily focuses on host and service monitoring, providing alerts and notifications for system failures or performance issues. On the other hand, NetData is a real-time monitoring tool that uses a self-contained, autonomous agent-based architecture. It aims to provide comprehensive real-time metrics for individual system components, such as CPU, memory, disk usage, network traffic, and application performance.
Ease of Installation and Configuration: Nagios often requires extensive configuration and setup to ensure proper monitoring of various hosts and services. It involves defining hosts, services, and complex configurations for alerts and notifications. Conversely, NetData follows a simple installation process, requiring minimal configuration. It automatically detects and monitors system components without the need for manual configuration.
User Interface and Visualization: Nagios offers a web-based user interface for monitoring status, graphs, and reports. However, the UI can be somewhat complex and less intuitive for beginners. NetData, on the other hand, provides an intuitive and visually appealing web interface that displays real-time metrics in an easy-to-understand manner. It offers interactive charts, dashboards, and detailed granularity of data for effective system visualization.
Scalability and Performance: Nagios is known for its scalability, as it can handle a large number of hosts and services efficiently. It can be distributed across multiple servers for increased performance. NetData also offers scalability, but it excels in monitoring smaller environments with a limited number of hosts and services. Its real-time monitoring capabilities may face limitations when dealing with massive infrastructure deployments.
Alerting and Notification: Nagios provides advanced alerting and notification features, allowing users to define thresholds, escalation rules, and customized notifications via email, SMS, or other channels. It supports various notification plugins for integration with external systems. NetData, however, focuses more on real-time monitoring and visualization rather than extensive alerting and notification capabilities. It offers basic alerting features but lacks some advanced options present in Nagios.
Community and Ecosystem: Nagios has a very active community with a wide range of extensions, plugins, and add-ons developed by the community members. It has been around since the late 1990s, making it more mature and widely adopted. NetData, though relatively newer, is gaining popularity due to its simplicity and real-time monitoring capabilities. However, it has a smaller community and ecosystem compared to Nagios.

In summary, Nagios is a powerful and flexible monitoring system, well-suited for complex infrastructures requiring comprehensive monitoring and alerting capabilities. On the other hand, NetData is a lightweight and user-friendly tool, ideal for real-time monitoring of individual system components with an emphasis on visualization.

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Advice on Nagios, Netdata

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	Netdata
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	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
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	Free, open-source; Easy installation and configuration; Access to monitoring unlimited metrics; Prebuilt dashboards and alarms; alerts on any metric, for a single host, an entire cluster, or your entire infrastructure; Tools for team collaboration; 800+ integrations
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 811	Stacks 226
Followers 1.1K	Followers 392
Votes 102	Votes 82
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 17 Free 14 Easy setup 12 Graphs are interactive 9 Montiors datasbases 9 Well maintained on github
Integrations
No integrations available	Puppet Labs CouchDB ActiveMQ Logstash Fail2ban TimescaleDB Windows Grafana MongoDB RabbitMQ

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Netdata?

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.

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

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.

Related Comparisons

Nagios vs NetData: What are the differences?

Key Differences Between Nagios and NetData

Architecture and Purpose: Nagios is an open-source monitoring system that uses a client-server architecture. It primarily focuses on host and service monitoring, providing alerts and notifications for system failures or performance issues. On the other hand, NetData is a real-time monitoring tool that uses a self-contained, autonomous agent-based architecture. It aims to provide comprehensive real-time metrics for individual system components, such as CPU, memory, disk usage, network traffic, and application performance.
Ease of Installation and Configuration: Nagios often requires extensive configuration and setup to ensure proper monitoring of various hosts and services. It involves defining hosts, services, and complex configurations for alerts and notifications. Conversely, NetData follows a simple installation process, requiring minimal configuration. It automatically detects and monitors system components without the need for manual configuration.
User Interface and Visualization: Nagios offers a web-based user interface for monitoring status, graphs, and reports. However, the UI can be somewhat complex and less intuitive for beginners. NetData, on the other hand, provides an intuitive and visually appealing web interface that displays real-time metrics in an easy-to-understand manner. It offers interactive charts, dashboards, and detailed granularity of data for effective system visualization.
Scalability and Performance: Nagios is known for its scalability, as it can handle a large number of hosts and services efficiently. It can be distributed across multiple servers for increased performance. NetData also offers scalability, but it excels in monitoring smaller environments with a limited number of hosts and services. Its real-time monitoring capabilities may face limitations when dealing with massive infrastructure deployments.
Alerting and Notification: Nagios provides advanced alerting and notification features, allowing users to define thresholds, escalation rules, and customized notifications via email, SMS, or other channels. It supports various notification plugins for integration with external systems. NetData, however, focuses more on real-time monitoring and visualization rather than extensive alerting and notification capabilities. It offers basic alerting features but lacks some advanced options present in Nagios.
Community and Ecosystem: Nagios has a very active community with a wide range of extensions, plugins, and add-ons developed by the community members. It has been around since the late 1990s, making it more mature and widely adopted. NetData, though relatively newer, is gaining popularity due to its simplicity and real-time monitoring capabilities. However, it has a smaller community and ecosystem compared to Nagios.

Nagios vs NetData

Overview

Nagios vs NetData: What are the differences?