Checkmk vs Icinga

Overview

Icinga

Stacks120

Followers97

Votes0

Checkmk

Stacks77

Followers99

Votes0

Checkmk vs Icinga: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Checkmk and Icinga are both powerful monitoring tools used in IT operations to ensure the availability and performance of systems and applications. While they share some similarities in terms of functionality, there are distinct differences between the two.

Architecture: Checkmk is a monolithic system with a central server that collects and processes monitoring data. In contrast, Icinga follows a distributed architecture, allowing for the distribution of monitoring components across multiple servers. This architecture enhances scalability and fault tolerance in large-scale environments.
Configuration Management: Checkmk offers a comprehensive and intuitive web-based GUI for configuration management, making it easier for administrators to define hosts, services, and monitoring rules. On the other hand, Icinga relies on configuration files, providing more flexibility and control over the configuration process but requiring manual editing of configuration files.
Notification Methods: Checkmk provides a wide range of notification methods, including email, SMS, Slack, and more. It also offers flexible notification rules that allow customization based on severity levels and timeframes. Icinga supports email notifications by default, but additional notification methods require the installation and configuration of external plugins.
Agent-based Monitoring: Checkmk supports agent-based monitoring, allowing the collection of detailed system information from remote hosts. It provides a variety of agent types, including an agent for Windows systems and an agent for Linux/UNIX systems. Icinga, on the other hand, primarily relies on agentless monitoring and network checks.
Integration and Plugins: Checkmk offers extensive integration capabilities with various third-party systems and applications, such as IT service management tools and cloud platforms. It also provides a wide range of pre-configured monitoring plugins to monitor specific technologies and applications. While Icinga also supports various plugins, it may require more manual configuration effort for integration with external systems.
Community Support and Development: Both Checkmk and Icinga have active communities and regular updates. However, Checkmk is commercially supported, offering a stable and supported version along with enterprise features. Icinga, being open-source, relies on community support and may have slight delays in bug fixes or feature enhancements compared to Checkmk.

In Summary, Checkmk and Icinga differ in their architecture, configuration management approach, notification methods, agent-based monitoring capabilities, integration options, and community/support models. Choosing between the two depends on specific requirements, preferences, and the complexity of the monitoring environment.

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CLI (Node.js)

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Advice on Icinga, Checkmk

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

Icinga	Checkmk
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.	Checkmk is a comprehensive solution for IT Monitoring of servers, applications, networks, cloud infrastructures (public, private, hybrid), containers, storage, databases and environment sensors.
-	State-based monitoring; Log- and event-based monitoring;Graphing and analytics;Customizable GUI;Reporting;Business Intelligence;Hardware and software inventory;Notifications and alert handler;Rule-based configuration, auto-discovery and agent deployment; Scalability; User Management with LDAP/Active Directory;Predictive Monitoring; Capacity Management; Single Sign-On; Dynamic host configuration
Statistics
Stacks 120	Stacks 77
Followers 97	Followers 99
Votes 0	Votes 0

What are some alternatives to Icinga, Checkmk?

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.

Nagios

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

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).

Related Comparisons

Checkmk vs Icinga: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Architecture: Checkmk is a monolithic system with a central server that collects and processes monitoring data. In contrast, Icinga follows a distributed architecture, allowing for the distribution of monitoring components across multiple servers. This architecture enhances scalability and fault tolerance in large-scale environments.
Configuration Management: Checkmk offers a comprehensive and intuitive web-based GUI for configuration management, making it easier for administrators to define hosts, services, and monitoring rules. On the other hand, Icinga relies on configuration files, providing more flexibility and control over the configuration process but requiring manual editing of configuration files.
Notification Methods: Checkmk provides a wide range of notification methods, including email, SMS, Slack, and more. It also offers flexible notification rules that allow customization based on severity levels and timeframes. Icinga supports email notifications by default, but additional notification methods require the installation and configuration of external plugins.
Agent-based Monitoring: Checkmk supports agent-based monitoring, allowing the collection of detailed system information from remote hosts. It provides a variety of agent types, including an agent for Windows systems and an agent for Linux/UNIX systems. Icinga, on the other hand, primarily relies on agentless monitoring and network checks.
Integration and Plugins: Checkmk offers extensive integration capabilities with various third-party systems and applications, such as IT service management tools and cloud platforms. It also provides a wide range of pre-configured monitoring plugins to monitor specific technologies and applications. While Icinga also supports various plugins, it may require more manual configuration effort for integration with external systems.
Community Support and Development: Both Checkmk and Icinga have active communities and regular updates. However, Checkmk is commercially supported, offering a stable and supported version along with enterprise features. Icinga, being open-source, relies on community support and may have slight delays in bug fixes or feature enhancements compared to Checkmk.

Checkmk vs Icinga

Overview