Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Nagios VS Open Telemetry

Compare Nagios VS Open Telemetry and see what are their differences

Nagios logo Nagios

Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

Open Telemetry logo Open Telemetry

An observability framework for cloud-native software.
  • Nagios Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21
  • Open Telemetry Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-27

Nagios features and specs

  • Extensive Community Support
    Nagios has a large and active user community, which means you can easily find help and resources online. There are numerous plugins and add-ons developed by the community that can extend the functionality of Nagios.
  • Highly Customizable
    Nagios is highly customizable and flexible. It allows you to tailor monitoring to suit your specific needs, including creating custom plugins, modifying configuration files, and integrating with other tools.
  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Nagios provides detailed monitoring of network services, host resources, and infrastructure systems. This includes the ability to monitor CPU load, disk usage, memory, and more.
  • Alerting and Notification
    Nagios has robust alerting and notification features that ensure you can stay informed of any issues or downtime. Alerts can be sent via email, SMS, or other communication channels.
  • Scalable
    Nagios is scalable and can grow with your organization. It supports a large number of hosts and services, making it suitable for both small and large enterprises.

Possible disadvantages of Nagios

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Nagios can be quite complex to set up and configure, especially for newcomers. The learning curve is steep, requiring time and effort to fully understand and utilize its capabilities.
  • Manual Configuration
    A significant amount of configuration is manual, particularly in the open-source version. This can be time-consuming and prone to human error, especially in larger environments.
  • Interface
    The user interface of Nagios is often considered outdated and less intuitive compared to other modern monitoring tools. The web interface can be difficult to navigate and is not as visually appealing.
  • Performance Issues
    Nagios can experience performance issues, particularly when monitoring a large number of hosts and services. It can become resource-intensive, requiring careful optimization and tuning.
  • Cost of Enterprise Version
    The enterprise version of Nagios, Nagios XI, comes with a significant cost. While it offers additional features, support, and a more user-friendly interface, it might not be affordable for all organizations.

Open Telemetry features and specs

  • Standardization
    OpenTelemetry provides a standardized set of APIs, libraries, and agents for collecting traces, metrics, and logs, helping to ensure consistency across different platforms and tools.
  • Vendor-neutrality
    OpenTelemetry is vendor-agnostic, allowing you to integrate with various backends, reducing lock-in with any specific monitoring solution.
  • Extensibility
    Its modular architecture allows developers to extend its functionalities easily, with support for custom instrumentation and exporters.
  • Community Support
    Being part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OpenTelemetry benefits from a large, active community contributing to its development and providing support.
  • Ease of Integration
    Pre-built instrumentation libraries and SDKs for multiple languages simplify the process of integrating telemetry into your applications.

Possible disadvantages of Open Telemetry

  • Complexity
    The broad scope of OpenTelemetry, which includes tracing, metrics, and logging, can make it complex to understand and configure correctly.
  • Performance Overhead
    The process of collecting and exporting telemetry data can introduce performance overhead, which needs to be managed carefully.
  • Evolving Ecosystem
    As an emerging standard, aspects of OpenTelemetry are still under active development and can change, potentially leading to frequent updates and maintenance.
  • Learning Curve
    Engineers might face a steep learning curve when adopting OpenTelemetry due to its comprehensive nature and the need to understand various components and best practices.
  • Limited Maturity of Some Components
    Some of the libraries and features may not be fully mature yet, potentially leading to bugs or incomplete implementations in certain environments or languages.

Nagios videos

Stop using Nagios - Andy Sykes

More videos:

  • Review - Bernd Erk - Why favour Icinga over Nagios
  • Review - How Nagios XI Works

Open Telemetry videos

No Open Telemetry videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Nagios and Open Telemetry)
Monitoring Tools
68 68%
32% 32
Log Management
80 80%
20% 20
Performance Monitoring
70 70%
30% 30
Website Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Nagios and Open Telemetry

Nagios Reviews

11 Best Nagios Alternatives (Free & Open Source) in 2024
Nagios is an open source network monitoring solution. It helps organizations to identify and resolve IT infrastructure issues. However, Nagios could be difficult integrate into automatic provisioning processes. There are few other issues with Nagios as well. Here, is a curated list of top tools that can replace Nagios. This list consists of paid as well as open-source...
Source: www.guru99.com
The Best Nagios Alternatives for Server, Application and Network Monitoring
Nagios is a very strong system monitoring package but its ability to compete in both the free and paid system monitoring market is frequently challenged. The free tool is very comprehensive. However, the Nagios team has taken away the traffic analysis functions from this, moving them off into a separate paid tool, which puts Nagios Core at a disadvantage when compared to...
The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
It’s also important to note that Nagios is completely open-source, which means that it’s free to use. However, “free to use” doesn’t mean that it won’t cost you anything. Often, the reason users look for alternatives to tools like Nagios is because of their open-source nature. Self-hosting a tool of this magnitude can be even more expensive than purchasing a SaaS subscription.
Source: betterstack.com
The Best Cacti Monitoring Alternatives
Nagios is free for small environments with seven or fewer nodes and hosts. Its paid version starts at $1995 for the license and is priced per user. There is also a variety of free training options for Nagios available online. Both of Nagios’ paid versions include a free trial.
10 Best Linux Monitoring Tools and Software to Improve Server Performance [2022 Comparison]
Nagios Core is an open-source Linux/Unix systems monitoring and alerting tool that can be extended through custom plugins, providing flexible Linux server monitoring. It remotely executes different plugins (executables or scripts) on your Linux server using the NRPE (Nagios Remote Plugin Executor) add-on, which gives you comprehensive monitoring data, including OS metrics,...
Source: sematext.com

Open Telemetry Reviews

We have no reviews of Open Telemetry yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Open Telemetry seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 187 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Nagios mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Nagios yet. Tracking of Nagios recommendations started around Mar 2021.

Open Telemetry mentions (187)

  • Working with OpenTelemetry Metrics
    Then I stumbled upon OpenTelemetry. It is a project that aims to provide a unified way to collect, process and export telemetry data. From a hundred thousand feet, it looks like they know what they are doing: standardized data definitions and protocols, semantic conventions, etc. To me, it is like a rulebook for telemetry data --something I find reassuring to rely on. - Source: dev.to / 3 days ago
  • Pomerium’s OpenTelemetry Tracing Support: Deeper Observability, Made Easy
    OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that standardizes how applications collect, process, and export telemetry data such as metrics, traces, and logs. It’s the successor to OpenCensus and OpenTracing, and is now the de facto industry standard for modern observability. - Source: dev.to / 7 days ago
  • Monitoring & Observability: New Tools to Watch in 2025
    OpenTelemetry has moved from being “the future” to “the foundation.” In 2025, a new generation of tools is being built on top of OpenTelemetry, providing automated correlation between metrics, traces, and logs. - Source: dev.to / 10 days ago
  • Kubernetes and Container Portability: Navigating Multi-Cloud Flexibility
    OpenTelemetry – a collection of tools for exporting telemetry data. - Source: dev.to / 30 days ago
  • Building a declarative home lab using k3s, Ansible, Helm on NixOS and Rocky Linux
    The Prometheus + Grafana stack is a good introduction to observability, and I want to dive deeper into this topic by replacing Prometheus with OpenTelemetry sometime in the future. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Nagios and Open Telemetry, you can also consider the following products

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

SigNoz - Open source alternative to Datadog

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases