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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Cloud Monitoring
  5. Amazon CloudWatch vs Nagios

Amazon CloudWatch vs Nagios

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch
Stacks12.0K
Followers8.2K
Votes214
Nagios
Nagios
Stacks811
Followers1.1K
Votes102
GitHub Stars57
Forks38

Amazon CloudWatch vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Amazon CloudWatch and Nagios

Introduction:

Amazon CloudWatch and Nagios are both monitoring tools used in the field of IT infrastructure management. While they share some similarities, there are several key differences that set them apart from each other. In this article, we will explore these differences in detail.

  1. Scalability and Infrastructure: Amazon CloudWatch is a cloud-based monitoring service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is designed to monitor AWS resources and applications running on AWS infrastructure. On the other hand, Nagios is an open-source monitoring tool that can be used to monitor both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure. It provides flexibility to monitor a wide range of systems and applications.

  2. Cost Model: Amazon CloudWatch has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, allowing users to pay only for the resources they use. The cost is determined based on the number of metrics, alarms, and API requests. Nagios, being open source, is free to use. However, it requires a dedicated server to run the monitoring software, which may incur additional hardware and maintenance costs.

  3. Integration and Compatibility: Amazon CloudWatch is tightly integrated with other AWS services, providing seamless monitoring and management capabilities for AWS resources. It offers out-of-the-box integration with various AWS services, enabling easy configuration and monitoring of cloud-based infrastructure. Nagios, being a more general-purpose monitoring tool, can be integrated with different systems and applications through plugins, allowing monitoring of a wide range of environments and technologies.

  4. Alerting and Notification: Amazon CloudWatch provides advanced alerting and notification capabilities. It allows users to set up alarms based on predefined thresholds and sends notifications via various channels like email, SMS, and AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS). Nagios also offers powerful alerting and notification features, allowing users to configure alerts based on specific conditions and send notifications via email, SMS, and other communication channels.

  5. Automation and Orchestration: Amazon CloudWatch integrates well with AWS automation and orchestration services like AWS Lambda and AWS Systems Manager. This enables users to automate various operations and tasks based on CloudWatch metrics and alarms. Nagios, being a more standalone monitoring tool, may require additional configurations and scripts to automate tasks based on monitoring data.

  6. Analytics and Visualization: Amazon CloudWatch offers built-in analytics and visualization features, allowing users to analyze monitoring data and gain insights into system performance and trends. It provides interactive dashboards and customizable charts to visualize metrics over time. Nagios, on the other hand, relies on third-party plugins and tools for analytics and visualization, which may require additional setup and configuration.

In Summary, Amazon CloudWatch is a scalable cloud-based monitoring service tightly integrated with AWS, while Nagios is an open-source monitoring tool with flexibility to monitor various infrastructure environments. CloudWatch has a pay-as-you-go model, offers seamless AWS integration, advanced alerting, automation capabilities, and built-in analytics. Nagios, being free to use, requires dedicated server setup, offers general-purpose monitoring, plugin-based integration, powerful alerting, automation with additional setup, and relies on third-party tools for analytics and visualization.

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Advice on Amazon CloudWatch, 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

Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch
Nagios
Nagios

It helps you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. It retrieve your monitoring data, view graphs to help take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment.

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

Basic Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: ten pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for an additional charge.;Amazon EBS volumes: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Elastic Load Balancers: thirteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon RDS DB instances: thirteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon SQS queues: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon SNS topics: four pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon ElastiCache nodes: twenty-nine pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon DynamoDB tables: seven pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;AWS Storage Gateways: eleven pre-selected gateway metrics and five pre-selected storage volume metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon Elastic MapReduce job flows: twenty-three pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Auto Scaling groups: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, optional and charged at standard pricing.;Estimated charges on your AWS bill: you can also choose to enable metrics to monitor your AWS charges. The number of metrics depends on the AWS products and services that you use, and these metrics are free of charge. Learn more about this option.
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
12.0K
Stacks
811
Followers
8.2K
Followers
1.1K
Votes
214
Votes
102
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 76
    Monitor aws resources
  • 46
    Zero setup
  • 30
    Detailed Monitoring
  • 23
    Backed by Amazon
  • 19
    Auto Scaling groups
Cons
  • 2
    Poor Search Capabilities
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

What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch, 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.

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

Stackdriver

Stackdriver

Google Stackdriver provides powerful monitoring, logging, and diagnostics. It equips you with insight into the health, performance, and availability of cloud-powered applications, enabling you to find and fix issues faster.

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).

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