Nagios vs Shinken

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Shinken

Stacks17

Followers39

Votes0

Nagios vs Shinken: What are the differences?

Introduction

Nagios and Shinken are both popular open-source network monitoring tools. While they serve a similar purpose, they have several key differences that sets them apart. Below, we will explore these differences in detail.

Scalability: Nagios is known for its limited scalability, as it operates on a single server. On the other hand, Shinken is designed to be highly scalable and can distribute the monitoring workload across multiple servers, allowing for greater flexibility and handling larger environments.
Flexibility: Nagios has a monolithic architecture, making it complex and difficult to modify. In contrast, Shinken is built using a modular architecture, allowing users to easily customize and extend its functionality with various plugins and addons, making it more flexible and adaptable to specific needs.
Fault-tolerance: Nagios lacks built-in fault tolerance features, so if the Nagios server goes down, the entire monitoring service becomes unavailable. Shinken, on the other hand, offers built-in high availability with features like distributed polling and redundancy, ensuring that monitoring services continue even if individual components fail.
Performance: Nagios is known to have performance limitations, particularly when handling a large number of checks. Shinken addresses this issue by distributing the monitoring load across multiple processes and servers, resulting in improved performance and the ability to monitor larger environments more effectively.
Ease of Configuration: Nagios configuration files can be complex and time-consuming to set up, requiring manual editing. Shinken simplifies the configuration process by providing a web-based user interface along with configuration wizards, making it easier to set up and manage monitoring configurations.
Community Support: Nagios has a larger and more established community with extensive documentation, tutorials, and plugins available. Shinken, while growing, has a smaller community and fewer resources compared to Nagios.

In summary, Nagios and Shinken differ in terms of scalability, flexibility, fault-tolerance, performance, ease of configuration, and community support. Shinken offers greater scalability, flexibility, fault-tolerance, and performance, along with an easier configuration process through its modular architecture and web interface. However, Nagios has a larger and more established community with extensive resources available.

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Advice on Nagios, Shinken

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	Shinken
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	Shinken's main goal is to give users a flexible architecture for their monitoring system that is designed to scale to large environments. Shinken is backwards-compatible with the Nagios configuration standard and plugins. It works on any operating system and architecture that supports Python, which includes Windows, GNU/Linux and FreeBSD.
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	Easy to install : install is mainly done with pip but some packages are available (deb / rpm) and we are planning to provide nightly build; Easy for new users : once installed, Shinken provide a simple command line interface to install new module and packs; Easy to migrate from Nagios : we want Nagios configuration and plugins to work in Shinken so that it is a “in place” replacement; Plugins provide great flexibility and are a big legacy codebase to use. It would be a shame not to use all this community work Multi-platform : python is available in a lot of OS. We try to write generic code to keep this possible; Utf8 compliant : python is here to do that. For now Shinken is compatible with 2.6-2.7 version but python 3.X is even more character encoding friendly; Independent from other monitoring solution : our goal is to provide a modular tool that can integrate with others through standard interfaces). Flexibility first; Flexible : in an architecture point view. It is very close to our scalability wish. Cloud computing is make architecture moving a lot, we have to fit to it; Fun to code : python ensure good code readability. Adding code should not be a pain when developing;
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 811	Stacks 17
Followers 1.1K	Followers 39
Votes 102	Votes 0
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	No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Shinken?

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

Nagios vs Shinken: What are the differences?

Introduction

Scalability: Nagios is known for its limited scalability, as it operates on a single server. On the other hand, Shinken is designed to be highly scalable and can distribute the monitoring workload across multiple servers, allowing for greater flexibility and handling larger environments.
Flexibility: Nagios has a monolithic architecture, making it complex and difficult to modify. In contrast, Shinken is built using a modular architecture, allowing users to easily customize and extend its functionality with various plugins and addons, making it more flexible and adaptable to specific needs.
Fault-tolerance: Nagios lacks built-in fault tolerance features, so if the Nagios server goes down, the entire monitoring service becomes unavailable. Shinken, on the other hand, offers built-in high availability with features like distributed polling and redundancy, ensuring that monitoring services continue even if individual components fail.
Performance: Nagios is known to have performance limitations, particularly when handling a large number of checks. Shinken addresses this issue by distributing the monitoring load across multiple processes and servers, resulting in improved performance and the ability to monitor larger environments more effectively.
Ease of Configuration: Nagios configuration files can be complex and time-consuming to set up, requiring manual editing. Shinken simplifies the configuration process by providing a web-based user interface along with configuration wizards, making it easier to set up and manage monitoring configurations.
Community Support: Nagios has a larger and more established community with extensive documentation, tutorials, and plugins available. Shinken, while growing, has a smaller community and fewer resources compared to Nagios.

Nagios vs Shinken

Overview

Nagios vs Shinken: What are the differences?