Nagios vs Splunk

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Splunk

Stacks772

Followers1.0K

Votes20

Nagios vs Splunk: What are the differences?

Introduction

Nagios and Splunk are two widely used monitoring tools in the IT industry. While both tools serve the purpose of monitoring, there are significant differences between the two. In this article, we will explore and highlight the key differences between Nagios and Splunk.

Deployment and Scalability: Nagios is traditionally deployed on-premise and requires a dedicated server for hosting. On the other hand, Splunk can be deployed both on-premise and in the cloud, offering more flexibility in terms of scalability and resource allocation.
Data Analysis and Visualization: Splunk is primarily known for its robust data analysis and visualization capabilities. It has advanced search functionalities, data correlation, and a user-friendly graphical interface, making it easier for users to gain insights from large volumes of data. Nagios, however, focuses more on alerting and event monitoring rather than in-depth data analysis and visualization.
Log Management vs Infrastructure Monitoring: Splunk is widely used as a log management tool, allowing users to collect, analyze, and manage logs from various sources. Nagios, on the other hand, is specifically designed for infrastructure monitoring, focusing on monitoring servers, network devices, and applications, and raising alerts in case of any failures or performance issues.
Customization and Extensibility: Nagios provides a high level of customization through its plugins and configuration files, allowing users to tailor the monitoring to their specific requirements. Splunk, on the other hand, offers a wide range of pre-built apps and integrations, making it easier to extend the functionality and integrate with other tools or systems.
Licensing and Cost: Nagios is an open-source tool that is available for free, making it an attractive choice for organizations with budget constraints. Splunk, on the other hand, offers both free and commercial versions. The commercial versions come with additional features, but they also come at a cost, which may not be suitable for all organizations.
Ease of Use and Learning Curve: Splunk, with its intuitive user interface and powerful search capabilities, tends to have a shorter learning curve compared to Nagios. Nagios, being a more traditional tool, requires more technical expertise and configuration knowledge, which may take some time for users to master.

In Summary, Nagios and Splunk differ in terms of deployment and scalability, data analysis and visualization capabilities, focus on log management and infrastructure monitoring, customization and extensibility options, licensing and cost models, and ease of use and learning curve.

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Advice on Nagios, Splunk

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	Splunk
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
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	Predict and prevent problems with one unified monitoring experience; Streamline your entire security stack with Splunk as the nerve center; Detect, investigate and diagnose problems easily with end-to-end observability
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 811	Stacks 772
Followers 1.1K	Followers 1.0K
Votes 102	Votes 20
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 3 Alert system based on custom query results 3 API for searching logs, running reports 2 Splunk language supports string, date manip, math, etc 2 Query engine supports joining, aggregation, stats, etc 2 Custom log parsing as well as automatic parsing Cons 1 Splunk query language rich so lots to learn

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Splunk?

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.

Papertrail

Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.

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.

Logmatic

Get a clear overview of what is happening across your distributed environments, and spot the needle in the haystack in no time. Build dynamic analyses and identify improvements for your software, your user experience and your business.

Loggly

It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.

Apache Spark

Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.

Logentries

Logentries makes machine-generated log data easily accessible to IT operations, development, and business analysis teams of all sizes. With the broadest platform support and an open API, Logentries brings the value of log-level data to any system, to any team member, and to a community of more than 25,000 worldwide users.

Logstash

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.

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

Related Comparisons

Nagios vs Splunk: What are the differences?

Introduction

Deployment and Scalability: Nagios is traditionally deployed on-premise and requires a dedicated server for hosting. On the other hand, Splunk can be deployed both on-premise and in the cloud, offering more flexibility in terms of scalability and resource allocation.
Data Analysis and Visualization: Splunk is primarily known for its robust data analysis and visualization capabilities. It has advanced search functionalities, data correlation, and a user-friendly graphical interface, making it easier for users to gain insights from large volumes of data. Nagios, however, focuses more on alerting and event monitoring rather than in-depth data analysis and visualization.
Log Management vs Infrastructure Monitoring: Splunk is widely used as a log management tool, allowing users to collect, analyze, and manage logs from various sources. Nagios, on the other hand, is specifically designed for infrastructure monitoring, focusing on monitoring servers, network devices, and applications, and raising alerts in case of any failures or performance issues.
Customization and Extensibility: Nagios provides a high level of customization through its plugins and configuration files, allowing users to tailor the monitoring to their specific requirements. Splunk, on the other hand, offers a wide range of pre-built apps and integrations, making it easier to extend the functionality and integrate with other tools or systems.
Licensing and Cost: Nagios is an open-source tool that is available for free, making it an attractive choice for organizations with budget constraints. Splunk, on the other hand, offers both free and commercial versions. The commercial versions come with additional features, but they also come at a cost, which may not be suitable for all organizations.
Ease of Use and Learning Curve: Splunk, with its intuitive user interface and powerful search capabilities, tends to have a shorter learning curve compared to Nagios. Nagios, being a more traditional tool, requires more technical expertise and configuration knowledge, which may take some time for users to master.

Nagios vs Splunk

Overview

Nagios vs Splunk: What are the differences?