naemon_logo I am using Nagios for about 8 years now for personal and professional usage. What I can say is, this is a super product, old and stable but not as scalable as I would like. We’re in the age of Cloud computing and in my opinion we shouldn’t have to take care about backup and monitoring in now days, this should be automatic.

I was searching a solution for my personal usages, that’s why I first wanted a lightweight solution but with enough maturity to auto discover my newly created LXC containers. In addition, I do not really agree on the strategic position that Nagios is taking so I wanted to change.

That’s why I first tried Shinken which was the best solution to fit my vision/needs. Shinken tend to be a powerful, scalable, Nagios configuration file replacement, with advanced features like auto discovery. A major version was recently released and I wanted to test it. But after 2 hours fighting on installation, trying to understand how the configuration work, because of the lack of documentation actually, I finally stopped to work in that direction as I didn’t had enough time to dig in it. However I still keep an eye on it as I’m pretty sure this will be the best monitoring solutions in the next months/years.

I also looked at Sensu as I heard a lot of it since a year and wanted to look ahead. Sensu has not enough features and maturity in my opinion to replace Nagios. More than that, agent is written in Ruby and I do not agree using with this language in a production environment (because of the required dependencies and resources usage due to this language). Sensu looks like interesting in the way it has been designed (Redis and RabbitMQ) but did not convinced me for the previous reasons I mentionned.

Zabbix is a complete solution and I always had good feedback about it. The required consuming resources it requires are a little bit high for my personal usage, but the auto discovery is not fully implemented yet and new interesting features are planned for next major release. So I didn’t choose that solution.

Naemon, I already talked about it, this is a Nagios 4 fork and looks very interesting. It doesn’t have auto discovery yet but this is the lightweight solution I’ve found and doesn’t change my Nagios configuration files at all. So I’ve choose this software for the moment as no other solution answered more my needs than Naemon. As there is no auto discovery, I implemented a faked auto discovery feature by automating the integration of new hosts in Naemon with Ansible (better than nothing).

After a few weeks of usage, Naemon works well, I do not reported any issues, the installation is really easy and Thruk is the default web interface :-). Naemon (like Shinken) brings livestatus plugin embedded with avoid to install all the check_Mk stack. I’m happy to choose that solution even if all my requirements are not there yet.

Now I am waiting the maturity of Shinken 2 :-)