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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Monitoring Tools
  5. Nagios vs StatsD

Nagios vs StatsD

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Nagios
Nagios
Stacks811
Followers1.1K
Votes102
GitHub Stars57
Forks38
StatsD
StatsD
Stacks373
Followers293
Votes31

Nagios vs StatsD: What are the differences?

What is Nagios? Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services. Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

What is StatsD? Simple daemon for easy stats aggregation. StatsD is a front-end proxy for the Graphite/Carbon metrics server, originally written by Etsy's Erik Kastner. StatsD is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

Nagios and StatsD belong to "Monitoring Tools" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Nagios are:

  • Monitor your entire IT infrastructure
  • Spot problems before they occur
  • Know immediately when problems arise

On the other hand, StatsD provides the following key features:

  • buckets: Each stat is in its own "bucket". They are not predefined anywhere. Buckets can be named anything that will translate to Graphite (periods make folders, etc)
  • values: Each stat will have a value. How it is interpreted depends on modifiers. In general values should be integer.
  • flush: After the flush interval timeout (defined by config.flushInterval, default 10 seconds), stats are aggregated and sent to an upstream backend service.

"It just works" is the primary reason why developers consider Nagios over the competitors, whereas "Single responsibility" was stated as the key factor in picking StatsD.

Nagios and StatsD are both open source tools. StatsD with 14.2K GitHub stars and 1.83K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Nagios with 60 GitHub stars and 36 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Nagios has a broader approval, being mentioned in 177 company stacks & 40 developers stacks; compared to StatsD, which is listed in 72 company stacks and 16 developer stacks.

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Advice on Nagios, StatsD

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

Nagios
Nagios
StatsD
StatsD

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

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).

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
Network daemon; Runs on the Node.js platform; Sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services
Statistics
GitHub Stars
57
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
38
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
811
Stacks
373
Followers
1.1K
Followers
293
Votes
102
Votes
31
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
  • 9
    Open source
  • 7
    Single responsibility
  • 5
    Efficient wire format
  • 3
    Loads of integrations
  • 3
    Handles aggregation
Cons
  • 1
    No authentication; cannot be used over Internet
Integrations
No integrations available
Node.js
Node.js
Docker
Docker
Graphite
Graphite

What are some alternatives to Nagios, StatsD?

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

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.

Jaeger

Jaeger

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

Telegraf

Telegraf

It is an agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics. Design goals are to have a minimal memory footprint with a plugin system so that developers in the community can easily add support for collecting metrics.

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