Munin vs Nagios

cactimuninnagios

We're currently using Nagios to monitor about 20 Linux machines (services and functional links). I just find out about Munin and I wonder if this is a Nagios replacement, or it can be used together with Nagios? I don't want to spend hours setting it up, just to discover that I already have all that functionality with Nagios.

I'd especially appreciate if someone who used both programs can give some insight about your experience. Which is better for which task and what do you recommend to use?

Note: we also used Cacti for some time. The main problem we have with Nagios is that setup takes too long and isn't very straightforward.

Best Answer

Munin and Nagios are really different tools.

From the official Munin website:

Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and "what just happened to kill our performance?" problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.

Nagios is a monitoring (alerting) tool. Munin could be considered a replacement for Cacti.

We use both of them: Nagios and Munin.

  • Nagios tell us in real time if something is wrong: like web server down, database load average, etc.
  • Using Munin you can see the trends and the history about why that happenend.
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