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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Monitoring Tools
  5. Nagios vs Riemann

Nagios vs Riemann

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Nagios
Nagios
Stacks811
Followers1.1K
Votes102
GitHub Stars57
Forks38
Riemann
Riemann
Stacks41
Followers55
Votes9

Nagios vs Riemann: What are the differences?

What is Nagios? Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services. Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

What is Riemann? A network monitoring system. Riemann aggregates events from your servers and applications with a powerful stream processing language. Send an email for every exception in your app. Track the latency distribution of your web app. See the top processes on any host, by memory and CPU.

Nagios and Riemann are primarily classified as "Monitoring" and "Network Monitoring" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Nagios are:

  • Monitor your entire IT infrastructure
  • Spot problems before they occur
  • Know immediately when problems arise

On the other hand, Riemann provides the following key features:

  • See your system at a glance with a Sinatra app
  • Throttle or roll up multiple events into a single message
  • Forward any event stream to Graphite

"It just works" is the top reason why over 49 developers like Nagios, while over 4 developers mention "Sophisticated stream processing DSL" as the leading cause for choosing Riemann.

Nagios and Riemann are both open source tools. Riemann with 3.77K GitHub stars and 510 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Nagios with 60 GitHub stars and 36 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Nagios, Riemann

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  • extendable I knew Nagios for decades but it was really outdated (by its architecture) at some point.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

Nagios
Nagios
Riemann
Riemann

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

Riemann aggregates events from your servers and applications with a powerful stream processing language. Send an email for every exception in your app. Track the latency distribution of your web app. See the top processes on any host, by memory and CPU.

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
See your system at a glance with a Sinatra app; Throttle or roll up multiple events into a single message; Forward any event stream to Graphite; Query states easily
Statistics
GitHub Stars
57
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
38
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
811
Stacks
41
Followers
1.1K
Followers
55
Votes
102
Votes
9
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
  • 5
    Sophisticated stream processing DSL
  • 4
    Clojure-based stream processing

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Riemann?

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.

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.

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

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