Nagios vs Ganglia [closed]

Question

Maybe a strange and green question, however

Is there anything that Nagios or Ganglia can do that the other can't?

In terms of monitoring, alerts in general.

I'm looking for a general solution for my school's computer club, in my mind its like comparing norton vs advast. both are antivirus however are there any specific benefits that one has over the other? Or am I asking a very stupid question now?

thank you.

Grind

saw that nagios has a ganglia plugin. are nagios and ganglia complimentary or competing solutions? – Grind

Answer 1

Ganglia is aimed at monitoring compute grids, i.e. a bunch of servers working on the same task to achieve a common goal - such as a cluster of web servers.

Nagios is aimed at monitoring anything and everything - servers, services on servers, switches, network bandwidth via SNMP etc etc. Nagios will send alerts based on set criteria (ie, you can set it to send yourself an email or if x service dies).

Note that they are not competing products, they are aimed at different scenarios. By the sounds of it, you need Nagios.

If you have a play around with some online demos, you should be able to get a feel for what product you need (and I think you'll agree with me that Nagios is more suited)

Nagios - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios (Wikipedia)

Ganglia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganglia_(software) (Wikipedia)

Poaceous

very cool reply. thank you kindly, will leave this question open for another day before accepting your answer. – Grind

For Ganglia, it possible to define custom metrics? Can a user write some code to push metrics from an application to Ganglia? – Grind

@Grind yes, in Ganglia you can define your own metrics, as long as you have your metrics registered with gmond, they will be polled. – Kukri

If Nagios monitors anything and everything why they are not competing products? Why should someone choose Ganglia instead of Nagios? – Wunderlich

@Wunderlich read of the whole answer again :-) They are aimed at different scenarios. Ganglia at grids, Nagios individual or groups of machines. Ganglia does a very good job of aggregating stats etc. Have a play with the links above, it may become clearer. – Poaceous

Thank you @Poaceous for your answer. As far as I understand Nagios provides grid monitoring services as well. Ganglia can also monitors a single host or a small cluster. That's why I'm still confused. The only criterion I can think of choosing the one or another is the alerting system Nagios provides. – Wunderlich