Re: munin vs nagios

[Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Tue, 13 Feb 2007, José L. Redrejo Rodríguez wrote:

> I've been digging in Google trying to find out why debian-edu decided to
> use Munin. I haven't found any doc or mail list messages with the
> discussion, maybe it was a long time ago.
> I've just would like to know if the nagios option has been considered,
> and in that case, what were the reasons to decide to go by Munin, as
> Nagios seems to be pretty much a standard in the industry. 

I don't know what reasons debian-edu chose but I can tell you about my
experience with these two.

When working in a medium-sized 3rd level college we used nagios and munin.
Nagios was used for monitoring uptime, making sure services were running,
mailing us when things went down, etc.  Munin was used for monitoring
detailed system statistics such as memory usage, network load, disk usage,
etc.  As an example, we discovered a slow memory leak in squid by looking
at munin's memory usage graphs and seeing that over weeks the usage was
drifting up.  Perhaps nagios can do this now, but I certainly wasn't aware
it could do it at the time.

These were very different tasks and while there is some overlap, we found
it was better to use both for what they were best at.  Whether that was
debian-edu/skolelinux's thinking, I don't know.

Gavin