MembersBrent GroverLucas SchillEdward SchillaAdvised by Danny Miller

http://projectsin.info

Project Goal & Mission Statement

Conclusions

Infrastructure

Rubric

Project S.I.N.

Shinken

Icinga

Nagios

The Team

Project S.I.N. is an in-depth comparison of the IT infrastructure monitoring tools Nagios, Shinken, and Icinga. This comparison is part of a senior design project at Michigan Technological University. Each of the three tools has its own strengths and weaknesses and there has not been a full comparison of all three at once. Our plan is to thoroughly document our comparison and make it available to the world.

The comparison will be based on scalability, usability, features, and overall performance. Along with ease of use comes peace of mind knowing that the solution can scale accordingly in the future to meet the needs of the company. This study will provide useful and factual information for any individual or company to choose the right tool for them.

Other Devices˗297 Virtualized Clients˗3 Physical Windows Clients˗Netgear 48-port Gigabit Switch

 Shinken Icinga Nagios Weight

Installation 10 6 6 5%

Configuration 4 7 8 15%Support 7 6 8 10%Interface 2 9 7 5%Plugins 9 8 8 10%

Availability 10 10 10  

Ease of installation 8 6 6  

Mobile Application 4 8 7 5%

Documentation 10 10 10 15%

Administration Total 64 70 70 65%         

Server Resources 7 5.5 6.5 20%Load 10 1 5  

Memory 4 10 8  

Net Resources 8 6 8 15%

Performance Total 29 22.5 27.5 35%         

Overall Weighted Score (Out of 10) 7.1 7.1 7.8  

HostnameOperating System Purpose Processor RAM

pfSense pfSense 2.0.1 Routing Dual P3 1GHz 3GB

SINSVR01 RHEL 6.3 Icinga Dual P4 2.8GHz 2GB

SINSVR02 RHEL 6.3 Nagios Dual P4 2.8GHz 2GB

SINSVR03 RHEL 6.3 Shinken Dual P4 2.8GHz 2GB

SINSVR04 Debian 6.0.7 KVM Host Core2quad 2.5GHz 3.5GB

SINSVR05 Debian 6.0.7 KVM Host Core2quad 2.5GHz  6GB

SINSVR06 Debian 6.0.7 Multipurpose Dual P3 1GHz 2GB

SINSVR07 Debian 6.0.7 KVM Host Dual-core Opteron 2GHz 4GB

SINSVR08 Debian 6.0.7 Storage Atom 1.66GHz 4GB

SINSVR09 Debian 6.0.7 KVM Host Core2quad 2.4GHz  2GB

SINSVR10 Debian 6.0.7 KVM Host Quad-core AMD 2.5GHz 8GB

Pros-Good looking interface-Excellent processing backend-Easiest installation-Lowest processing power required

Pros˗The cleanest, most useful Interface˗Best memory usage˗Organized well

Pros-No major downsides-Largest community-Enterprise support

Nagios is the de-facto standard for network monitoring for a reason. It is relatively easy to install, configure, and use. The community is the largest of the three, and it has both enterprise support and software editions. Although there isn’t anything exceedingly special about Nagios itself, it is solid across all categories.

Shinken and Icinga tied at the bottom in the scoring rubric because they succeeded in different categories while others were complete downfalls. Icinga uses a lot of processing power in order to complete it’s checks, and process its data. Shinken, on the other hand, was easy to install but very difficult to administer and manage compared to the other two. The interface was by far the worst of the three and focused more on appearance than functionality.

This project was not able to reach the scope needed to successfully test more features, such as advanced scalability. These Nagios alternatives may offer more advanced functionality than their spiritual predecessor, so in an enterprise environment the victor might be different.

The rubric was designed to accurately measure the software based on the needs of the user. More weight was put into the performance usage than the other categories. These numbers are based on the opinions of the team members.

The team behind this project is composed of 3 seniors pursuing their Computer Networking and System Administration degree at Michigan Technological University.

They choose this project based on their strong interest in working with Linux, and their curiosity about alternatives to the very popular Nagios.

Cons-Interface has little functionality-Configuration files are slightly more complex

Nagios rewrite using Python.

Cons˗Lots of network traffic˗High processing load

Cons-Outdated Interface-No major upsides

Nagios fork written in C.

The original network monitoring suite written in C.