Nowadays it’s not uncommon for companies to use Nagios as their main monitoring tool for networks, systems and applications. But it’s worth mentioning that Nagios is no longer the only one to meet those features, and it’s not rare to see people giving preference to other tools such as Zabbix or Pandora FMS. And this is because, for a few years now,there are a whole bunch of monitoring tools available on the market. Although most share the same features and offer most of the same solutions, not all are the same, which can make it confusing to choose one. In this article we want to compare two of the most used solutions: Nagios and Zabbix, and line them both up against one of the more “underground” solutions: Pandora FMS, for perspective purposes.

Management and Setup

Now it’s in this aspect that we can appreciate the largest differences between all three tools. Whilst both Zabbix and Pandora FMS have a web-based management interface, Nagios has decided to keep it old school, and is still managed through a complex maze of text files, scripts and manual procedures that also make a necessity to use third party tools in order to deploy it, such as Chef or Puppet.

Now if we had to compare these three in terms of management ease, although all three are somewhat stable, Nagios can be an utter chaos to manage. Regarding this, which is very related to the tool’s learning curve; both Nagios and Pandora include Enterprise Editions, while Zabbix doesn’t.

Comparison in terms of plugins and “out of the box” monitoring

Our first conclusion drawn up 'till now is that both Nagios and Zabbix need an array of plugins installed in order for them to be efficient and offer complete features. Although, as a negative note, Zabbix doesn’t have an “official” plugin library for its community. On the other side, Nagios doesn’t offer the possibility to work with Enterprise tools such as Oracle in its “Core” version.

In its favor though, Nagios has a huge library but it’s low on maintenance since all the plugins in it are 100% open source and there’s no company to back it up or take care of them.

Pandora, despite not having such a huge library as Nagios, has just under 500 company maintained plugins and, disregarding the fact that some of those plugins have paid licensing, they’re all focused toward daily products that are “real”, not only towards open technology.

Zabbix on its side has a powerful template and trigger definition system that’s based on regular expressions. As a counterpart, on Nagios this is inexistent —at least it’s not available on its open source version— and on Pandora FMS it’s been replaced by visual prompt screens and wizards that are integrated with the WEB interface, and tend to be much more user friendly.

Community value

Hands down, the largest community is that of Nagios, simply because it put the flag up in uncharted terrain and has been so many years running, that it’s inevitable for its community to be large. As a matter of fact, the amount of Nagios forks is near infinite: OpsView, OP5, Centreon, Icinga, Naemon, Shinken, and many more. This, as we mentioned before, leads to a very unorganised ecosystem of plugins and tools that can be crossed over from one fork or Nagios system, to another. Considering each branch has its own mindset and development, they end up being totally incompatible with other branches and with the original project, Nagios.

REPORTS AND GRAPHS

All three of the mentioned tools have a “customisable user screen” that they all apply with slight differences. Nagios is again the most unique one of the three since it needs a plugin with its own entity (Nagvis) but on the other two, this feature is included out of the box.

The reports that Nagios generates are quite poor when put in comparison. Zabbix and Pandora FMS both improve on this feature, although if what you’re looking for is to generate a report good and simple enough to turn in to your boss or a customer, Pandora FMS is probably going to be the best option.

AGENTS

Some people consider agent-based monitoring technology to be something of the past, but this is not entirely true, since very large manufacturers such as CA, HP or IBM still use agent-based tech. They do so making it seem like they’re using 100% agentless monitoring tools.

Nagios has nice selection of agents but, like so many other things on Nagios, they are meant to be quite DIY, and on many occasions this leads to a lack of maintenance or to some of them being outdated and near useless.

Zabbix, on the other hand, has a lot more complex features “built in” to the agent itself that can’t be applied using scripts since it forces the agent to work on a low level, instead of at user level.

SCALABILITY

For this aspect we have to limit ourselves to comparing what each company proves in their success stories and customer examples. Based on this information Pandora FMS has some of the largest reported installations. According to Pandora FMS’ claims and to how their distributed architecture works (included in v 6.0 and onward), on the Enterprise Edition you can monitor up to a million nodes.

Nagios has a broad spectrum of DIY ways to offer distributed monitoring. On the other hand, both Zabbix and Pandora FMS offer similar models, with the difference that Pandora has a specific product (called the Metaconsole) for larger, distributed or more complex environments.

We hope that after reading this article you feel a little more informed when it comes to choosing the best monitoring tool for you and your company. If you have any doubts, suggestions, or general opinions, we insist you leave them in the comments section.

You can find more detailed information in Zabbix vs Nagios vs PandoraFMS: an in depth comparison |