Icinga2 vs grafana

Hello Team,

Can anyone help me to differentiate icinga vs grafana.

  1. What is main difference between ICINGA and Grafana?
  2. Why we need to use Icinga instead of grafana?
  3. Why we need to use grafana instead of icinga?
  4. We can integrate icinga to grafana? How ?
  5. Which monitoring tool is user friendly ICINGA or GRAFANA?

Hello Team,

Can anyone help me to differentiate icinga vs grafana.

Here are my opinions / ideas:

  1. What is main difference between ICINGA and Grafana?

Icinga is a monitoring system, Grafana is a data visualisation system.

Icinga works on a timescale of minutes and hours (to days and years), Grafana
works on a timescale of seconds and minutes (to days and years).

  1. Why we need to use Icinga instead of grafana?

Because you want to set up service checks for things like disk space,
processes running, package updates available, active user accounts… and
raise alerts when these service checks indicate a problem.

  1. Why we need to use grafana instead of icinga?

Because you want to visualise time-series data from a data store and be able
to zoom in and investigate the data, combine graphs to see correlations, etc.

  1. We can integrate icinga to grafana? How ?

I do not believe that is possible, nor do I see that it would be useful.

  1. Which monitoring tool is user friendly ICINGA or GRAFANA?

Grafana is not a monitoring tool; it doesn’t perform any service checks, it
doesn’t check your servers to ensure they’re running properly; it just
represents whatever data you have put into the data store/s that Grafana is
looking at.

I also think the concept of “user friendliness” is highly dependent on the
user, so it’s difficult to give an absolute measure of.

Regards,

Antony.

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Hi Antony,

Thanks for your response.
Can you please explain some more points difference between icinga and grafana with images. So i need to know this in deep and i need to prepare some presentation on this topic.

Sorry, but I do not have the time for that - screenshots and descriptions take
some time to put together well, so I recommend you either install them
yourself and make some images of something you can personally talk about, or
use images (with appropriate attribution, naturally) from the proejcts’
documentation sites.

If you “need to know this in deep” then you have to use it for yourself - you
won’t get that from someone else making a presentation for you.

Regards,

Antony.

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Actually, Icinga can plug with grafana using tsdb export feature, you could then read from this tsdb with grafana, on overall it would mean icinga would be still the polling engine, but grafana would be the visualization part, i agree on overall with what you explained, but i would also add that to compare properly monitoring tools, you need to split them in distinct parts (agent, polling engine, database, front end part, etc)
https://icinga.com/docs/icinga2/latest/doc/14-features/#opentsdb-writer
https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/features/datasources/opentsdb/

Integrating Grafana into Icinga makes very good sense to me (it’s an excellent
replacement for pnp4nagios, for example), however that’s the opposite of what
the the OP was asking about.

I repeat: I can’t see any reason to integrate Icinga into Grafana.

Regards,

Antony.

1 Like