As part of the contest we conducted recently, we got 130 comments from the geeky readers who choose their favorite system monitoring tools.
Based on this data, the top spot goes to.. drum roll please..
Nagios
If you are new to any of the top 5 tools mentioned here, please read the rest of the article to understand more about them.
Fig: Favorite System Monitoring Tool Voting Results
1. Nagios – Network Monitoring Software
Nagios won by a huge margin. This is not a suprise to lot of people, as Nagios is hands-down the best monitoring tool. As you already know, I love Nagios and have been using it for a long time. I have also written several tutorials on Nagios (and many more to come).
- Home Page: http://www.nagios.org
- Author: Ethan Galstad
- Latest stable release: 3.2
- License: Open Source. GNU.
- Read more about Nagios at Wikipedia.
2. Cacti – Network Monitoring Software
Cacti uses RRDtool for the network graphing solution. Using Caci you can monitor and graph – CPU Load, Network bandwidth utilization, network traffic monitor etc.,
Cacti also supports plugin architecture. Some admins like the powerful graphing feature provided by Cacti, they use both Nagios and Cacti in their environment as the network monitoring tools.
- Home Page: http://www.cacti.net
- Latest stable release: 0.8.7e
- License: Open Source. GNU.
- Read more about Cacti at Wikipedia.
3. Top (and other top variations)
- Top Command – Few of you have mentioned top command as your favorite monitoring tool
- ntop (Network Top) – Ntop is a free network monitoring software. ntop displays network usage information in a similar fashion to top command output. You can also create HTML output file (dump) of the network status using ntop. Apart from the command line, you can also launch the web version of the ntop once you’ve started the ntopd service and visit http://{ip-address}:3000 from browser.
- htop (interactive process viewer for Linux) – htop is similar to top command with few additional features. The main difference is that you can use mouse to interact with the htop command output.
4. Zabbix
Zabbiz is an open source monitoring solution with a commercial support provided by a company – Zabbix SIA, who primarily develops the software. Zabbix requires a database to store the monitoring data. You can choose any DB of your choice – MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or SQLite.
Zabbix has the following three main modules:
- Server (written in C)
- Agents (written in C)
- Frontend (PHP and Javascript)
Additional information about Zabbix:
- Home Page: http://www.zabbix.com
- Latest stable release: 1.6.6
- License: Open Source. GNU.
- Developed by: Zabbix SIA (Private company)
- Read more about Zabbix at Wikipedia
5. Munin
Similar to Cacti, Munin uses RRDTool to present the output in a pretty graph via web interface. The primary emphasis of Munin is on the plug and play architecture for it’s plugin. There are lot of plugins available for Munin, which will just work out-of-the box without lot of tweaking.
- Home Page: http://munin.projects.linpro.no
- Latest stable release: 1.2.6
- License: Open Source. GNU.
- Read more about Munin at Wikipedia
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Hmmm, I must of missed the voting, but I would have definitely liked to see GroundWorks higher up (well definitely above Nagios) – simply because groundwork is Nagios in a sense but with a nice database and webfront end for the configurations – It saves a lot of time when setting up new hosts and services simply because you don’t have to type everything out and the Autodiscovery Feature is something that Nagios doesn’t have thus making setup and the time spent setting up hosts/services through Groundworks a breeze – autodiscovery also assigns a few checks to a newly discovered host making the service setup much easier.
Groundwork has everything any Nagios has and more and can do it better and faster in my personal view – but none the less Nagios is still a good monitor.
P.S. with TOP monitoring don’t forget about ATOP – try it out and see for your self it is my most frequently used TOP monitoring.
Thanks for the feedback. The top 5 choices aren’t surprising. If my math is correct, there are 37 responses which fall under “Other”. It would be interesting to see which tools are included in that group. There could be some hidden gems there.
Best,
alfred_e_neuman
OpenNMS – snmp based monitoring tool that incorporates rrdtool, asset management and excellent reporting. Hundreds of oid based alerts are pre-configured for many hardware vendors.
Nagios lo tengo funcionando en mis servidores y tengo excelentes resultados de monitoreo y de envío de alarmas en eventos críticos.
Munin tambien lo utilizo para monitorear el acceso a los servidores WEB.
Translation: Spanish » English
I have Nagios running on my servers and have excellent results of monitoring and to send alarms in critical events.
Munin is also used to monitor access to Web servers.
After the best monitoring tools, it will be nice to have a topic about the remote monitoring services like watchmouse, alertra, internetVista, alertsite or keynote. Those services are completely complementary to monitoring tools.
Thanks for the props Hendrick! GroundWork also includes Cacti as well as Nagios. We bundle both. So in a sense, I feel like we kind of hold three of the spots up there.
I also feel like our 6.0 product which will GA in September blows anything you guys have seen out of the water. It’s seriously slick.
You can download the beta now: http://www.gwos.com/community/downloads
Send your feedback, please. We’d love to know how the community feels!
are there any online monitoring solutions? I tried nagio and gave up after the initial install. I’m a newbie in Linux.
Thanks
HEHE, no Prob Net Diva and I will definately have a look at the new 6.0
Sam, definitaley try Groundwork, after resolving dependancies (I haven’t done the install in a while, but if memory serves there aren’t major dependancies to solve) the install is very straight foward and the rest is done from a webinterface.
I thought Cacti was the best.I am really surprised at this result.
For those who are interested, here is the list of all system monitoring tools mentioned by users along with the votes.
Following tools received more than 1 vote:
Nagios 64
Cacti 9
top 6
Zabbix 5
Munin 3
Centreon 3
Big Brother 3
Groundworks 3
conky 3
OpenNMS 2
htop 2
gkrelm 2
Following tools received only one vote:
BitDefender Total Security 1
Azul RTPM 1
RTO Pinpoint for Windows 1
Solarwind Orion 1
Network monitor 1
Pandora FMS 1
OPSview (Using Nagios) 1
glance (HP and HP-UX) 1
ntop 1
Nagiosgraph 1
icinga 1
Ganglia 1
Monit 1
Monitorix 1
strace 1
NetDisco 1
Dynatrace 1
Hobbit 1
lm_sensors 1
sar 1
tcpdump 1
netlogger 1
history 1
XYMON 1
uptime 1
ossim 1
SMARTS 1
rrdtool 1
I think Zenoss is worth mentioning here. It’s an open source (GPLv2) monitoring application that can monitor servers, networks and apps. It’s one of the most active projects on Sourceforge(https://sourceforge.net/projects/zenoss/) and incorporates RRDTool. It also supports execution of Nagios plugins. Definitely worth a look if you need both availability and performance monitoring. Plus it autodiscovers devices so no more manually updating config files.
I’m surprised so few votes overall were cast – from the mailign lists I personally subscribe to, I would’ve expected a) many more votes and b) OpenNMS to rank substantially higher
I have worked with Nagios an Cacti for years.
I also have active developed some little things for cacti.
After all i prefer Zenoss…
I am smitten with Xymon (aka Hobbit, aka Big Brother) – they really are extensions of each other… so they are pretty interchangeable.
I liked MicroMuse’s commercial Netcool/Omnibus product – but that was before the IBM/Tivoli buyout and ruination.
Nagios, ZenOSS, Ground Works, Cacti are all good; and have reasonable learning curve.
Zabbix is hard as hell to get really meaningful documentation for.