Fluentd vs Nagios

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Fluentd

Stacks630

Followers688

Votes39

GitHub Stars13.4K

Forks1.4K

Fluentd vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Fluentd and Nagios. Both Fluentd and Nagios are widely used open-source tools in the field of IT infrastructure monitoring and log management. However, they have distinct functionalities and features that set them apart.

Architecture: Fluentd is a log collector and aggregator, designed to handle large volumes of log data in a distributed manner. It uses a tag-based system to filter and route logs to various destinations. On the other hand, Nagios is a monitoring tool that checks the status and health of various services and systems in real-time. It uses a centralized server-agent architecture to collect and process monitoring data.
Purpose: Fluentd is primarily used for log collection, parsing, filtering, and forwarding. It aims to provide a unified logging layer for various applications and services. It can collect logs from multiple sources, parse them into a structured format, and forward them to various destinations such as Elasticsearch, Kafka, or other systems. Nagios, on the other hand, focuses on monitoring the availability and performance of systems, networks, and applications. It sends alerts and notifications when predefined thresholds are breached.
Flexibility and Extensibility: Fluentd provides a highly flexible and extensible logging framework. It supports a wide range of plugins and can be easily customized to fit specific logging requirements. It can handle log data from various sources and transform it into a standardized format, making it easier to analyze and process. Nagios, while not as flexible as Fluentd in terms of log management, offers a rich set of monitoring plugins and can be extended to monitor a wide range of services and systems.
Alerting and Notification: Nagios excels in alerting and notification capabilities. It supports various notification methods such as email, SMS, and custom scripts. Nagios allows users to define different escalation levels and notification intervals based on the severity of the issue detected. Fluentd, on the other hand, does not have built-in alerting and notification features. It focuses mainly on log collection and routing.
Integration and Compatibility: Fluentd is highly compatible with various systems and technologies. It has plugins available for popular applications, databases, and servers, enabling easy integration and log collection. Nagios also provides a wide range of plugins for different monitoring scenarios, making it compatible with various systems and services.
Ease of Use and Learning Curve: Fluentd has a relatively steeper learning curve compared to Nagios. It requires some knowledge of configuration files, plugins, and filtering mechanisms. Nagios, on the other hand, has a more intuitive web-based user interface and easier configuration setup, making it relatively easier for beginners to start monitoring their systems.

In summary, Fluentd is a powerful log management tool focused on log collection, parsing, and forwarding, while Nagios is a comprehensive monitoring tool that excels in real-time system and application monitoring, with robust alerting and notification capabilities.

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Advice on Nagios, Fluentd

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	Fluentd
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	Fluentd collects events from various data sources and writes them to files, RDBMS, NoSQL, IaaS, SaaS, Hadoop and so on. Fluentd helps you unify your logging infrastructure.
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	Open source; Flexible; Minimum resources; Reliable
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57	GitHub Stars 13.4K
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks 1.4K
Stacks 811	Stacks 630
Followers 1.1K	Followers 688
Votes 102	Votes 39
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 11 Open-source 10 Great for Kubernetes node container log forwarding 9 Easy 9 Lightweight

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Fluentd?

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.

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

Graylog

Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.

Related Comparisons

Fluentd vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Introduction

Architecture: Fluentd is a log collector and aggregator, designed to handle large volumes of log data in a distributed manner. It uses a tag-based system to filter and route logs to various destinations. On the other hand, Nagios is a monitoring tool that checks the status and health of various services and systems in real-time. It uses a centralized server-agent architecture to collect and process monitoring data.
Purpose: Fluentd is primarily used for log collection, parsing, filtering, and forwarding. It aims to provide a unified logging layer for various applications and services. It can collect logs from multiple sources, parse them into a structured format, and forward them to various destinations such as Elasticsearch, Kafka, or other systems. Nagios, on the other hand, focuses on monitoring the availability and performance of systems, networks, and applications. It sends alerts and notifications when predefined thresholds are breached.
Flexibility and Extensibility: Fluentd provides a highly flexible and extensible logging framework. It supports a wide range of plugins and can be easily customized to fit specific logging requirements. It can handle log data from various sources and transform it into a standardized format, making it easier to analyze and process. Nagios, while not as flexible as Fluentd in terms of log management, offers a rich set of monitoring plugins and can be extended to monitor a wide range of services and systems.
Alerting and Notification: Nagios excels in alerting and notification capabilities. It supports various notification methods such as email, SMS, and custom scripts. Nagios allows users to define different escalation levels and notification intervals based on the severity of the issue detected. Fluentd, on the other hand, does not have built-in alerting and notification features. It focuses mainly on log collection and routing.
Integration and Compatibility: Fluentd is highly compatible with various systems and technologies. It has plugins available for popular applications, databases, and servers, enabling easy integration and log collection. Nagios also provides a wide range of plugins for different monitoring scenarios, making it compatible with various systems and services.
Ease of Use and Learning Curve: Fluentd has a relatively steeper learning curve compared to Nagios. It requires some knowledge of configuration files, plugins, and filtering mechanisms. Nagios, on the other hand, has a more intuitive web-based user interface and easier configuration setup, making it relatively easier for beginners to start monitoring their systems.

Fluentd vs Nagios

Overview