Introduction
Zabbix is a comprehensive open-source monitoring solution that can be used to monitor IT infrastructure, networks, servers, virtual machines, and cloud services. It offers real-time visibility into the health and performance of systems and provides features for capacity planning, trend analysis, and integrations with third-party tools.
Nagios
Nagios is an open-source software application that helps thousands of companies to monitor systems, networks, and infrastructure.
Easy to set up and configure, it consolidates all internal and client servers into one core and compact monitoring. Unfortunately, you need a dedicated person with SysAdmin knowledge in order to have Nagios up and running.
Pricing
Nagios is open-source software, available for free to download and use.
Pros
- Can do network, servers, websites, or services analysis
- Effective data collection and storage – old data is cleaned automatically to secure disk space
- Great technical documentation
- Works almost in all environments (operating systems)
- Easy to navigate things thanks to the sidebar
- Tons of plugins already implemented (most likely they will cover all your specific needs)
- Suitable for small and large organizations
- Plugins could be written in any programming language
Cons
- Web UI is ugly and old school
- Have no security configuration (anybody can access your monitoring Web UI)
- No official support
- The web interface is too difficult for beginners or new users
- Configuration syntax is complex and needs time to learn
- Everything is customizable but needs SysAdmin time
Icinga
Icinga is an open-source computer system and network monitoring application originally created as a fork of the Nagios system monitoring application in 2009 and is designed to be scalable and extensible.
Pricing
No setup fee
Free Trial
Free/Freemium Version
Pros
- Centralized dashboard
- Issue tracking
- Reporting
- Proactive responses to issues before they happen
- Reporting of all systems and being able to check against SLAs
- Manageability of incidents
Cons
- Decluttering – the dashboard seems to get very overwhelming
- Segregation – would be helpful to split environments or clients into different areas
- You will need to keep the dashboard open to get the alerts
Munin
Munin is a free and open-source computer system monitoring, network monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring software application written in Perl. It provides monitoring of numerous parameters such as CPU load, memory usage, network traffic, disk usage, and more.
Pricing
A free trial is not available
Pros
- The Munin-node-config command is an awesome tool that can be used to add all available graphs for specified hosts/switches/equipment.
- It is also the #1 tool when you need to find out why some graph doesn’t work, helping you to find out the issue immediately.
- It doesn’t annoy you to update it every time like any other software tools
- smooth setup, easy to maintain, and it’s fast to enroll
Cons
- Graphs are rendered in PNG, not interactive
- You cannot to rewrite rules of your graphs.
- No ability to pre-render graphs for email alerts
Checkmk
Checkmk is software that was developed in Python and C++. It is designed for the monitoring of servers, applications, networks, cloud infrastructures, containers, storage, databases, and environment sensors.
Pricing
Pricing is per service, i.e. per monitored metric, such as CPU utilization.
Raw Edition: free forever
Enterprise – Free Edition: limited to monitoring max. 10 hosts.
Pros
- Detect issues automatically & alert intelligently
- Powerful REST-API
- Integrations with popular notification tools: Slack, PagerDuty, SIGNL4, VictorOps & more
- 2,000+ out-of-the-box high-quality plug-ins
- offers a whole monitoring framework
- 1800 check plugins
- Resolve problems even before they are real problems
- You can contribute your own code to the final product
- Ability to monitor almost every device
- Performance is great, even in bigger setups (>2000 hosts).
Cons
- At first glance, the GUI can appear to be overwhelming due to the sheer number of features that are available.
- Too many choices in the menu which makes it “crowded”
- Some features are too complex for beginners
Better Alternatives
If you looking for a monitoring solution that has:
- Great customer support
- Does not require a dedicated SysAdmin to manage
- Has a nice Web UI
- Can be managed using mobile
Then we can’t recommend anything except UptimeTea.
If you have any questions or specific needs for monitoring – let us know by asking in Live Chat or emailing us at support@uptimetea.com
Conclusion
Indeed, key features and system capabilities are key factors in determining which infrastructure monitoring platform is best suited for your company’s needs. As no single monitoring tool encompasses all benefits and advantages, it’s still best to determine how each strength and weakness contribute to the overall success and security of your business.