System monitoring for a new generation with Prometheus
Big Watcher
© Lead Image © Kurhan, 123RF.com
Legacy monitoring solutions are fine for small-to-medium-sized networks, but complex environments benefit from a different approach. Prometheus is an interesting alternative to classic tools like Nagios.
Where monitoring is required, alerting and trending are never far away. Alerting plays a major role in practically any monitoring environment; the idea is to draw the administrator's attention to failures. And, trending is also important. Trending helps the admin detect potential bottlenecks at an early stage.
A quick look at the available monitoring solutions shows why Monitoring, Alerting, and Trending (MAT) are still an issue for many networks, particularly large and complex networks. Nagios, which has dominated the monitoring market for a long time, is a behemoth of complexity and comes with some inherent weaknesses.
Nagios alternatives such as Icinga have attempted to address some of the issues, but their scalability is limited. The ballast of compatibility with Nagios and its plugins aggravates the situation. A state-of-art feature like trending was not exactly designed into the legacy Nagios. PNP4Nagios [1], a performance-tracking Nagios add-on, is one of the few options for useful trending with Nagios (Figure 1).
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