Checkmk vs Nagios

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Checkmk

Stacks77

Followers99

Votes0

Checkmk vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Checkmk and Nagios are both popular open-source monitoring solutions used to ensure the health and performance of IT infrastructure. Let's explore the key differences between them:

Monitoring Approach: Checkmk and Nagios have different approaches to monitoring. Checkmk uses an agent-based monitoring approach, where an agent is installed on the target system to collect and send monitoring data to the monitoring server. On the other hand, Nagios uses a agentless monitoring approach, where it relies on protocols like SNMP, SSH, and NRPE to gather monitoring information from the target systems.
User Interface: Checkmk offers a more user-friendly and intuitive web interface compared to Nagios. Checkmk provides a modern and responsive UI that allows users to easily navigate through the monitoring configuration, view live monitoring data, and generate reports. Nagios, on the other hand, has a more traditional and less visually appealing user interface.
Configuration: Checkmk simplifies the configuration process by providing a rule-based configuration system. Users can define monitoring rules and apply them to multiple hosts, reducing the need for manual configuration. Nagios, on the other hand, requires manual configuration of each host and service, making it more time-consuming and prone to errors.
Monitoring Capabilities: Checkmk offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities, including system-level monitoring, network monitoring, application monitoring, and performance monitoring. It also supports automatic service discovery and monitoring of dynamic infrastructure. Nagios, while also capable of monitoring various aspects, may require additional plugins and configuration to achieve the same level of flexibility and functionality as Checkmk.
Notifications and Alerting: Both Checkmk and Nagios provide notifications and alerting functionality. However, Checkmk offers more advanced notification options, including flexible escalation chains, acknowledgement handling, and customizable notification templates. Nagios, on the other hand, has a more basic notification system that may require additional customization to meet specific requirements.
Community and Support: Nagios has been around for a longer time and has a larger community, which means more resources and support available. Checkmk, although relatively newer, has a growing community and active support channels, with regular updates and new features being introduced.

In summary, Checkmk focuses on user-friendly monitoring with streamlined setup and management, making it suitable for organizations seeking quick implementation and ease of use. Nagios, with its extensive plugin ecosystem and flexibility, is favored by those requiring fine-grained control and customization over their monitoring setup.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Nagios, 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

Nagios	Checkmk
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	Checkmk is a comprehensive solution for IT Monitoring of servers, applications, networks, cloud infrastructures (public, private, hybrid), containers, storage, databases and environment sensors.
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	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
GitHub Stars 57	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 811	Stacks 77
Followers 1.1K	Followers 99
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, 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.

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

Checkmk vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Checkmk and Nagios are both popular open-source monitoring solutions used to ensure the health and performance of IT infrastructure. Let's explore the key differences between them:

Monitoring Approach: Checkmk and Nagios have different approaches to monitoring. Checkmk uses an agent-based monitoring approach, where an agent is installed on the target system to collect and send monitoring data to the monitoring server. On the other hand, Nagios uses a agentless monitoring approach, where it relies on protocols like SNMP, SSH, and NRPE to gather monitoring information from the target systems.
User Interface: Checkmk offers a more user-friendly and intuitive web interface compared to Nagios. Checkmk provides a modern and responsive UI that allows users to easily navigate through the monitoring configuration, view live monitoring data, and generate reports. Nagios, on the other hand, has a more traditional and less visually appealing user interface.
Configuration: Checkmk simplifies the configuration process by providing a rule-based configuration system. Users can define monitoring rules and apply them to multiple hosts, reducing the need for manual configuration. Nagios, on the other hand, requires manual configuration of each host and service, making it more time-consuming and prone to errors.
Monitoring Capabilities: Checkmk offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities, including system-level monitoring, network monitoring, application monitoring, and performance monitoring. It also supports automatic service discovery and monitoring of dynamic infrastructure. Nagios, while also capable of monitoring various aspects, may require additional plugins and configuration to achieve the same level of flexibility and functionality as Checkmk.
Notifications and Alerting: Both Checkmk and Nagios provide notifications and alerting functionality. However, Checkmk offers more advanced notification options, including flexible escalation chains, acknowledgement handling, and customizable notification templates. Nagios, on the other hand, has a more basic notification system that may require additional customization to meet specific requirements.
Community and Support: Nagios has been around for a longer time and has a larger community, which means more resources and support available. Checkmk, although relatively newer, has a growing community and active support channels, with regular updates and new features being introduced.

Checkmk vs Nagios

Overview