Centreon vs Prometheus

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Centreon vs Prometheus: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this Markdown code, we will outline the key differences between Centreon and Prometheus, two popular monitoring tools used for IT infrastructure management.

  1. Scalability: Centreon is a powerful monitoring tool known for its scalability and performance. It can handle large-scale environments with thousands of hosts and services. On the other hand, Prometheus is designed for small to medium-sized environments and may struggle to scale efficiently in larger deployments.

  2. Data Storage: Centreon relies on a traditional relational database management system (RDBMS) for data storage. This provides the advantage of using a structured and well-established database technology. In contrast, Prometheus uses a custom time-series database that is optimized for storing and retrieving time-series data. This allows Prometheus to handle high-resolution monitoring data efficiently.

  3. Alerting and Notification: Centreon offers a comprehensive alerting and notification system. It provides flexible configuration options for defining alert rules and supports various notification methods like email, SMS, and integration with third-party tools. Prometheus also has alerting capabilities but its approach is more focused on rule-based alerts and uses its own Alertmanager component for managing notifications.

  4. Data Collection: Centreon collects monitoring data using passive and active checks. Passive checks involve receiving data from monitored hosts, while active checks involve actively querying hosts for data. Prometheus, on the other hand, follows a pull-based model where it scrapes metrics from the targets exposed by exporters. This allows Prometheus to collect data from a wide range of systems and applications.

  5. Query and Visualization: Centreon provides a web-based interface that allows users to query and visualize monitoring data. It offers various pre-built views and reports to analyze data and track performance. Prometheus has its own query language called PromQL, which allows users to perform powerful queries and aggregations on time-series data. It also provides a built-in visualization tool called Grafana, which offers rich visualizations and dashboards for Prometheus data.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Centreon has a strong community and a wide range of plugins and extensions available. It provides a marketplace for users to share and download additional functionalities. Prometheus also has a vibrant community and a rich ecosystem of exporters, integrations, and third-party tools. However, being relatively newer compared to Centreon, the availability of certain plugins or integrations may vary.

In summary, Centreon excels in scalability, data storage using RDBMS, and a comprehensive alerting system. On the other hand, Prometheus shines in its custom time-series database, pull-based data collection, powerful query language, and visualization capabilities using Grafana. Both tools have active communities but Centreon has a more established marketplace for additional functionalities.

Advice on Centreon and Prometheus
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 817.7K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

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Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 603.1K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.

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Sunil Chaudhari
Needs advice
on
MetricbeatMetricbeat
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Hi, We have a situation, where we are using Prometheus to get system metrics from PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) platform. We send that as time-series data to Cortex via a Prometheus server and built a dashboard using Grafana. There is another pipeline where we need to read metrics from a Linux server using Metricbeat, CPU, memory, and Disk. That will be sent to Elasticsearch and Grafana will pull and show the data in a dashboard.

Is it OK to use Metricbeat for Linux server or can we use Prometheus?

What is the difference in system metrics sent by Metricbeat and Prometheus node exporters?

Regards, Sunil.

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Replies (2)
Matthew Rothstein
Recommends
on
PrometheusPrometheus

If you're already using Prometheus for your system metrics, then it seems like standing up Elasticsearch just for Linux host monitoring is excessive. The node_exporter is probably sufficient if you'e looking for standard system metrics.

Another thing to consider is that Metricbeat / ELK use a push model for metrics delivery, whereas Prometheus pulls metrics from each node it is monitoring. Depending on how you manage your network security, opting for one solution over two may make things simpler.

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Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

Hi Sunil! Unfortunately, I don´t have much experience with Metricbeat so I can´t advise on the diffs with Prometheus...for Linux server, I encourage you to use Prometheus node exporter and for PCF, I would recommend using the instana tile (https://www.instana.com/supported-technologies/pivotal-cloud-foundry/). Let me know if you have further questions! Regards Jose

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Needs advice
on
CentreonCentreon
and
ZabbixZabbix

My team is divided on using Centreon or Zabbix for enterprise monitoring and alert automation. Can someone let us know which one is better? There is one more tool called Datadog that we are using for cloud assets. Of course, Datadog presents us with huge bills. So we want to have a comparative study. Suggestions and advice are welcome. Thanks!

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Replies (4)
Geoffrey Timmerman
Systems Engineer at Simac · | 6 upvotes · 291.9K views
Recommends
on
ZabbixZabbix
at

I work at Volvo Car Corporation as a consultant Project Manager. We have deployed Zabbix in all of our factories for factory monitoring because after thorough investigation we saw that Zabbix supports the wide variety of Operating Systems, hardware peripherals and devices a Car Manufacturer has.

No other tool had the same amount of support onboard for our production environment and we didn't want to end up using a different tool again for several areas. That is the major strong point about Zabbix and it's free of course. Another strong point is the documentation which is widely available; Zabbix Youtube channel with tutorial video's, Zabbix share which holds free templates, the Zabbix online documentation and the Zabbix forum also helped us out quite a bit. Deployment is quite easy since it uses templates, so almost all configuration can be done on server side.

To conclude, we are really pleased with the tool so far, it helped us detect several causes of issues that were a pain to solve in the past.

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Recommends
on
CentreonCentreon

Centreon is part of the Nagios ecosystem, meaning there is a huge number of resources you may find around in the community (plugins, skills, addons). Zabbix monitoring paradigms are totally different from Centreon. Centreon plugins have some kind of intelligence when they are launched, where Zabbix monitoring rules are configured centrally with the raw data collected. Testing both will help you understand :) Users used to say Centreon may be faster for setup and deployment. And in the end, both are full of monitoring features. Centreon has out of the box a full catalog of probes from cloud to the edge https://www.centreon.com/en/plugins-pack-list/ As soon as you have defined your monitoring policies and template, you can deploy it fast through command line API or REST API. Centreon plays well in the ITSM, Automation, AIOps spaces with many connectors for Prometheus, ServiceNow, GLPI, Ansible, Chef, Splunk, ... The polling server mode is one of the differentiators with Centreon. You set up remote server(s) and chose btw multiple information-exchange mechanisms. Powerful and resilient for remote, VPN, DMZ, satellite networks. Centreon is a good value for price to do a data collection (availability, performance, fault) on a wide range of technologies (physical, legacy, cloud). There are pro support and enterprise version with dashboards and reporting. IT Central Station gathers many user feedback you can rely on both Centreon & Zabbix https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/centreon-reviews  

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muutech
at Muutech Monitoring Solutions, S.L. · | 3 upvotes · 289.5K views
Recommends
on
ZabbixZabbix

We highly recommend Zabbix. We have used it to build our own monitoring product (available on cloud -like datadog- or on premise with support) because of its flexibility and extendability. It can be easily integrated with the powerful dashboarding and data aggregation of Grafana, so it is perfect. All configuration is done via web and templates, so it scales well and can be distributed via proxies. I think there also more companies providing consultancy in Zabbix (like ours) than Centreon and community is much wider. Also Zabbix roadmap and focus (compatibility with Elasticsearch, Prometheus, TimescaleDB) is really really good.

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Recommends
on
KamonKamon
at

Hi Vivek, what's your stack? If huge monitoring bills are your concern and if you’re using a number of JVM languages, or mostly Scala / Akka, and would like “one tool to monitor them all”, Kamon might be the friendliest choice to go for.

Kamon APM’s major benefit is it comes with a built-in dashboard for the most important metrics to monitor, taking the pain of figuring out what to monitor and building your own dashboards for weeks out of the monitoring.

https://kamon.io/apm/

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Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 745.9K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.

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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.

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Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/

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Pros of Centreon
Pros of Prometheus
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 47
      Powerful easy to use monitoring
    • 38
      Flexible query language
    • 32
      Dimensional data model
    • 27
      Alerts
    • 23
      Active and responsive community
    • 22
      Extensive integrations
    • 19
      Easy to setup
    • 12
      Beautiful Model and Query language
    • 7
      Easy to extend
    • 6
      Nice
    • 3
      Written in Go
    • 2
      Good for experimentation
    • 1
      Easy for monitoring

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of Centreon
    Cons of Prometheus
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 12
        Just for metrics
      • 6
        Bad UI
      • 6
        Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints
      • 4
        Not easy to configure and use
      • 3
        Supports only active agents
      • 2
        Written in Go
      • 2
        TLS is quite difficult to understand
      • 2
        Requires multiple applications and tools
      • 1
        Single point of failure

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      What is Centreon?

      It is a network, system, applicative supervision and monitoring tool. It is one of the most flexible and powerful monitoring softwares on the market; it is absolutely free and Open Souce.

      What is 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.

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      What are some alternatives to Centreon and Prometheus?
      Nagios
      Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.
      Zabbix
      Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.
      Icinga
      It monitors availability and performance, gives you simple access to relevant data and raises alerts to keep you in the loop. It was originally created as a fork of the Nagios system monitoring application.
      Solarwinds
      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.
      JavaScript
      JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
      See all alternatives