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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Website Monitoring
  5. Nagios vs Pingdom

Nagios vs Pingdom

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Pingdom
Pingdom
Stacks2.4K
Followers1.4K
Votes579
Nagios
Nagios
Stacks811
Followers1.1K
Votes102
GitHub Stars57
Forks38

Nagios vs Pingdom: What are the differences?

## Introduction
Nagios and Pingdom are both popular monitoring tools used by organizations to ensure the health and performance of their systems and services. While they share some commonalities, there are key differences between the two platforms.

1. **Monitoring capabilities**: Nagios is a highly customizable open-source monitoring tool that allows users to monitor a wide range of network services, hosts, and applications. Users have the flexibility to define their own monitoring plugins and customize alerting rules. In contrast, Pingdom is a cloud-based monitoring service that primarily focuses on website monitoring, server monitoring, and transaction monitoring. It offers a user-friendly interface with pre-built monitoring checks and dashboards.

2. **Scalability**: Nagios is known for its scalability and can be used to monitor large-scale enterprise environments. It can handle complex monitoring scenarios and thousands of devices efficiently. On the other hand, Pingdom is more suitable for small to medium-sized businesses or individuals who require a simple yet effective monitoring solution for a limited number of resources.

3. **Alerting capabilities**: Nagios provides advanced alerting features such as email notifications, SMS alerts, and integration with third-party ticketing systems. Users can set up escalation policies and define multiple notification methods based on specific conditions. Pingdom also offers alerting capabilities, but the options are relatively limited compared to Nagios. Users can receive alerts via email, SMS, or push notifications.

4. **Cost**: Nagios is an open-source tool, which means users have access to the core monitoring features for free. However, additional plugins, support, and enterprise-level features may incur costs. Pingdom, being a commercial product, follows a subscription-based pricing model. Users can choose from different pricing tiers based on their monitoring requirements and budget.

5. **Ease of use**: Pingdom is known for its simplicity and ease of use. Setting up monitoring checks and configuring alerts is straightforward, making it an ideal choice for users who prioritize a user-friendly interface. In contrast, Nagios has a steeper learning curve and requires more technical expertise to set up and manage effectively. Customizing monitoring configurations in Nagios may require scripting or coding knowledge.

6. **Support and community**: Nagios has a strong user community and extensive documentation available online. Users can find answers to common issues, participate in forums, and access community-contributed plugins and extensions. In comparison, Pingdom offers dedicated support to its customers, ensuring prompt assistance and resolution of technical issues.

In Summary, Nagios and Pingdom offer distinct monitoring capabilities tailored to different user needs and preferences.

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Advice on Pingdom, Nagios

Matthias
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.
142k views142k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Pingdom
Pingdom
Nagios
Nagios

Pingdom is an uptime monitoring service. When problems happen with a site that Pingdom monitors, it immediately alerts the owner so the problem can be taken care of.

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

Uptime & Response time reports;Multi-step transaction monitoring;Email, text & twitter alerts;Multiple check locations;Root cause analysis;Public and email reports;Monitor that your websites and servers are working- Pingdom tests your websites and other infrastructure components as often as every minute to make sure it is all up and running.;Be the first to know if something breaks- When an error occurs, you can get alerted via email, text (SMS), Twitter, or a mobile notification to your Android and iOS device.;Easily spot trends in your performance- The results of all tests that we perform are saved, and we use that data to create graphs of your site's historical uptime and performance.;When it breaks, find out why- If an issue occurs with one of your sites, we use additional tests such as a traceroute to help you find out where the problem is.;Identify broken and slow website interactions- Monitor parts of a website like the login, search, check out, or other user interactions that are important to you.;Use it wherever you are- You can use our mobile apps for Android and iOS to view report data and the current status of your sites while on the go.
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
-
GitHub Stars
57
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
38
Stacks
2.4K
Stacks
811
Followers
1.4K
Followers
1.1K
Votes
579
Votes
102
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 224
    Simple and reliable
  • 103
    Monitoring your websites
  • 75
    Easy to use dashboard
  • 65
    Email, text & twitter alerts
  • 43
    Free tier
Cons
  • 4
    Expensive
  • 3
    UI is incredibly complicated
  • 2
    Hard to set up alerts properly
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
Integrations
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
CloudFlare
CloudFlare
Cloudability
Cloudability
StatusPage.io
StatusPage.io
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Pingdom, Nagios?

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.

Better Stack

Better Stack

Better Stack is a radically better infrastructure monitoring platform that calls the right person on your team if anything goes wrong. Schedule on-call duties, receive helpful alerts, and collaborate on solving incidents faster than ever.

Kibana

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

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.

UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot

It is all about helping you to keep your websites up. It monitors your websites every 5 minutes and alerts you if your sites are down.

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.

StatusCake

StatusCake

Monitoring a website is one thing – finding the best way to alert you to downtime another. At StatusCake we give you as many options as possible to decide when & how often you’re contacted. Whether it’s by email, SMS, push notifications for iOS & Android or integration with third party apps including Zapier and PagerDuty – you decide how you want to be alerted and when!

updown.io

updown.io

updown is an online service that checks your website's status by periodically sending an HTTP HEAD request to the URL of your choice. It then notifies you by email or sms when your website is not responding correctly.

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