Since our last article “Quo vadis Nagios?” about the Nagios monitoring system and the different Alternatives, such as Icinga or Shinken, have already passed another two years. During this time, not much has happened in the developments around Nagios itself, but it has happened in many other open source projects that are monitoring solutions compatible with Nagios. Now that our own Nagios installation and that of some customers is getting on in years and there are some points where we can no longer quite do so with our current monitoring system, we are now able to , we have now taken the time to take a closer look at the two major open source projects Shinken and Icinga. To do this, we installed and tested both systems in parallel. We will explain our findings and experiences with the two systems in more detail in the following section.

Shinken & Skonf

The basic information about Shinken can already be found in our article “Quo vadis Nagios?“, which is why I will not go into it further here.
Compared to the Nagios, Shinken comes with its own web-based configuration tool, which is intended to make it easier for the user to configure his Shinken installation. An interesting feature is the independent service detection when adding new hosts. The surface itself looks quite simple and modern. Unfortunately, we couldn’t use Skonf for our tests because it didn’t work after installing it. ht worked by itself and we can use it even after several times I didn’t manage to configure it properly. Any changes in the Skonf were not in the configuration even after restarting Shinken

see. Documentation is available in the official wiki, but not all features, configuration options and problems can be found there and the community is currently still quite small. Overall, we found the approach abe r and hope that we can try out the Skonf interface in the future.

Icinga

Icinga is probably one of the most well-known Nagios forks and is characterized above all by its active development and compatibility with the Nagios configuration. Just like with Shinken, you can in principle simply import your existing Nagios configuration and continue to use it. In addition, the Icinga team has fixed many of the annoying Nagios bugs over the years, making the overall system a bit more stable. A big advantage compared to Shinken are the existing Dabian packages for easy installation and maintenance of Icinga and its accessories.

Icinga-Web

Apart from the well-known Nagios web interface, Icinga also comes with a new, Ajax-based and chic web interface. It requires the use of an IDO database, which acts as an interface between the web interface and the he actual Icinga installation. This new interface provides a clear and structured display of the current states and also offers the possibility to send certain commands to the Icinga daemon, for example to activate the active checks or the notifications. If you use a reporting system, such as Jasper, in addition to monitoring, you can easily integrate it into Icinga and Icinga-Web.

Shinken vs. Icinga

Through many experiments that we have carried out with both systems and things that we have tested with the two systems, we have gained a lot of new experience.

The setup effort is somewhat higher with Shinken than with Icinga, but overall both monitoring systems make a good impression at first glance after installation. The integration of PNP4Nagios, NagiosQL, etc. is possible in principle with both, but there are some differences in the setup effort. Shinken currently has a small community and the documentation is very scarce. This makes it more difficult for newcomers in particular to delve deeper into the configuration and functional principle of the software and you are therefore more dependent on yourself in case of problems. The initial setup is therefore much more complex and difficult with Shinken than with Icinga. Shinken worked without major problems during operation, but the competitor Icinga ran noticeably more stable and worked better with the additionally installed plugins/add-ons. More information about the two most important plugins can be found in the fo paragraphs.

PNP4Nagios

The plugin for collecting and displaying performance data, the Nagiosgrapher, is also getting on in years and is no longer actively developed. Therefore, we looked for an alternative here as well and decided on the PNP4Nagios tool, which offers its own web interface and also works well with Icinga or Shinken. As with Nagiosgrapher, the monitoring data is stored in an RRD file and then graphically processed and displayed. Whether the data is the CPU usage or the values of a temperature sensor is completely irrelevant. The graphs can then be conveniently generated for specific periods of time and also exported as PDFs.

NagiosQL and Nconf

NagiosQL is a graphical configuration tool that allows you to create and customize the Nagios/Icinga/Shinken configuration via a web interface. This saves you the work with the many different configuration files and allows you to make changes quickly and in a targeted manner. In the blink of an eye In this way, new service checks, hosts, escalations or notifications can be added and existing ones can be edited.

NagiosQL is written in PHP and runs on any Apache web server. It only needs an additional MySQL database to store the configuration. After the successful change of the settings, the Nagios-compatible configuration files are generated and the monitoring system is restarted so that the new configuration takes effect.

The installation and configuration of NagiosQL itself is a bit more complicated, but once it’s set up, it works amazingly. In our test, the integration into Shinken was a bit more cumbersome and it took a bit of manual work to get the whole thing up and running. However, NagiosQL is easily compatible with Icinga and the installation works without any major problems.
We also took a closer look at the Nconf tool and tested it. However, we quickly realized that Nconf does not offer a range of functions comparable to NagiosQL and that we would have to supplement it with our own solutions.
For us, NagiosQL is therefore a reasonable replacement for the previous solution, which is already clearly outdated, despite its somewhat old-fashioned interface. The project is open source and is actively being developed, which is why we naturally enjoy using the tool.

Result

Shinken made a rather unfinished and mixed impression for us overall, which is why we are giving the still relatively young software some time to develop before it goes live. On the other hand, the Nagios alternative Icinga makes a very positive impression. The interaction with NagiosQL and PNP4Nagios, their integration into the overall system and normal operation worked without any problems. Apart from minor configuration differences compared to the old Nagios, Icinga runs very stable and makes a solid overall impression all in all.

For this reason, we have chosen Icinga, along with some other components, as the main component for our “Monitoring Server 2013“. In this way, we offer our customers a modular and scalable system that is characterized above all by stability, up-to-dateness and convenient operation.

IT remains exciting!

Yours, Andreas Erhard