Nagios vs Solarwinds

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Solarwinds

Stacks80

Followers119

Votes0

Nagios vs Solarwinds: What are the differences?

Introduction

Nagios and Solarwinds are both popular network monitoring tools used by organizations to ensure the stability and efficiency of their IT infrastructure. While both tools have similar functionalities, they also have key differences in terms of their features and capabilities.

Scalability: Nagios is known for its scalability, allowing users to monitor a large number of devices and systems simultaneously. It is capable of handling thousands of checks per second, making it suitable for larger organizations with extensive networks. On the other hand, Solarwinds is more limited in scalability, as it may become less efficient when monitoring a significant number of devices or systems.
Customization: Nagios provides extensive customization options, allowing users to tailor the monitoring system according to their specific requirements. It supports plugins, scripts, and the ability to define custom monitoring checks. Conversely, Solarwinds has a more limited customization capability, with fewer options for creating customized monitoring checks.
Ease of Use: Solarwinds offers a user-friendly interface, making it easier for non-technical users to navigate the system and set up monitoring. It provides intuitive dashboards and predefined monitoring templates, simplifying the configuration process. Nagios, while powerful, has a steeper learning curve and requires more technical expertise to set up and customize effectively.
Alerting and Reporting: Nagios provides comprehensive alerting and reporting functionalities, allowing users to set up notifications and receive alerts via various channels such as email, SMS, or mobile apps. It also generates detailed reports on network performance and availability. Solarwinds also offers alerting and reporting features but may have limitations in terms of customization and flexibility compared to Nagios.
Community Support: Nagios has a large and active user community, offering a wealth of resources, plugins, and community-developed extensions that provide additional functionality. This community-driven support makes it easier to troubleshoot issues and find solutions to common problems. While Solarwinds also has a community, it is not as extensive or active as Nagios'.
Cost: Nagios is an open-source tool, making it free to use and customize. This makes it an attractive option for organizations with budget constraints. On the other hand, Solarwinds is a commercial tool and requires a paid license. The cost of Solarwinds can vary depending on the number of devices and systems to be monitored, making it more suitable for organizations with larger budgets.

In summary, Nagios and Solarwinds differ in terms of scalability, customization, ease of use, alerting and reporting capabilities, community support, and cost. While Nagios offers greater scalability, customization, and community support with its open-source nature, Solarwinds provides an easier-to-use interface, extensive alerting and reporting features, and commercial support at a cost.

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Advice on Nagios, Solarwinds

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	Solarwinds
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	Developed by network and systems engineers who know what it takes to manage today's dynamic IT environments, SolarWinds has a deep connection to the IT community.
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 -
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 811	Stacks 80
Followers 1.1K	Followers 119
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, Solarwinds?

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 Solarwinds: What are the differences?

Introduction

Scalability: Nagios is known for its scalability, allowing users to monitor a large number of devices and systems simultaneously. It is capable of handling thousands of checks per second, making it suitable for larger organizations with extensive networks. On the other hand, Solarwinds is more limited in scalability, as it may become less efficient when monitoring a significant number of devices or systems.
Customization: Nagios provides extensive customization options, allowing users to tailor the monitoring system according to their specific requirements. It supports plugins, scripts, and the ability to define custom monitoring checks. Conversely, Solarwinds has a more limited customization capability, with fewer options for creating customized monitoring checks.
Ease of Use: Solarwinds offers a user-friendly interface, making it easier for non-technical users to navigate the system and set up monitoring. It provides intuitive dashboards and predefined monitoring templates, simplifying the configuration process. Nagios, while powerful, has a steeper learning curve and requires more technical expertise to set up and customize effectively.
Alerting and Reporting: Nagios provides comprehensive alerting and reporting functionalities, allowing users to set up notifications and receive alerts via various channels such as email, SMS, or mobile apps. It also generates detailed reports on network performance and availability. Solarwinds also offers alerting and reporting features but may have limitations in terms of customization and flexibility compared to Nagios.
Community Support: Nagios has a large and active user community, offering a wealth of resources, plugins, and community-developed extensions that provide additional functionality. This community-driven support makes it easier to troubleshoot issues and find solutions to common problems. While Solarwinds also has a community, it is not as extensive or active as Nagios'.
Cost: Nagios is an open-source tool, making it free to use and customize. This makes it an attractive option for organizations with budget constraints. On the other hand, Solarwinds is a commercial tool and requires a paid license. The cost of Solarwinds can vary depending on the number of devices and systems to be monitored, making it more suitable for organizations with larger budgets.

Nagios vs Solarwinds

Overview

Nagios vs Solarwinds: What are the differences?