When presenting our open-source IT Monitoring solution we’re often asked about how we position ourselves against Nagios®.
After all, we started as a company in 2005 by developing an open-source web interface to the then-leading solution that did so much to democratize IT Monitoring. And although we forked Nagios® seven years ago to improve on its performance and scalability and never looked back, we made sure we’d maintain compatibility with its plugin mechanism, a key asset to ease metrics collection in a vast variety of IT environment.
We’ve moved a long way since then, we have written our own comprehensive library of robust open-source plugins and developed a complete suite of monitoring software, so maybe we should share some information about where we stand on the subject.
Our open-source IT Monitoring solution is called Centreon. The open-source part of Nagios® is called Nagios Core. Both are free of charge for an unlimited usage. Let’s compare the two using a feature table based on their web site information:
Nagios Core |
Centreon |
|
Complete Infrastructure Monitoring |
x |
x |
Hundreds of Free Addons |
x |
x |
Open Source Monitoring Engine |
x |
x |
Forum Support |
x |
x |
Available as Source Install Script |
x |
|
CentOS RedHat v6/7 RPM |
x |
|
Scalability |
x |
|
Pre-Configured Virtual Machine |
x |
|
Quickstart Guides |
x |
|
Web Configuration UI (CCM) |
x |
|
Performance Graphing (PNP) |
x |
|
SNMP Trap Support |
x |
|
Database Backend |
x |
|
Integrated UI |
x |
|
Dashboards |
x |
|
User-Specific Customization |
x |
|
Audit Logging |
x |
We developed Centreon to be a complete, comprehensive, easy-to-use open-source IT Monitoring platform: download and install the ISO or OVA image and you’re ready to go, with dashboards made of multiple widgets to view and share the real-time availability and performance of your IT infrastructure and applications. Whatever the number of host to monitor, and whether they’re all in a single site or spreaded in a massively distributed environment…
Which doesn’t mean you can’t go further and plan for a more ambitious monitoring solution: we also offer the Centreon Enterprise Monitoring System software suite (Centreon EMS) to that avail. But this has already been the subject of numerous blog posts.
I hope this post clarifies our positioning, but please contact us for a more detailed information.