IT monitoring is essential to guarantee the performance and availability of a company’s information system. However, in the jungle of monitoring tools, it can be difficult to find your way around…
That’s why we’ve selected three Open Source solutions to boost your IS: Zabbix, Centreon and Grafana.
What is IT monitoring?
To begin with, IT monitoring can be defined as the overseeing and control of a specific perimeter of the information system. In fact, it monitors the performance and health of equipment, applications and services to detect problems early on. This improves reliability and availability while optimizing maintenance costs.
Find out more in this article.
Zabbix
![](https://www.canopsis.fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Zabbix_logo.png)
Launched in 2001, Zabbix is one of the oldest Open Source IT monitoring solutions on the market.
Zabbix enables you to monitor a wide range of IS components: networks, servers, cloud, applications and services. It also notifies stakeholders when thresholds are exceeded or malfunctions occur, and features a data visualization interface.
Zabbix is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2. The publisher also offers five support packages for professionals, as well as eight other ancillary services.
Centreon
![Centreon logo - Article Open Source IT monitoring solutions](https://www.canopsis.fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Centreon-1024x241.png)
With its first version released in 2005, Centreon is a recognized player in the IT monitoring market, thanks to its expertise in supervising infrastructures, networks and the digital user experience.
The core and modules developed by its community (≈ 250,000 professionals) are Open Source. On the other hand, publisher functions are available under three paying licenses: Centreon IT Edition, Centreon Business Edition and Centreon MSP Edition.
Grafana
![](https://www.canopsis.fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/grafana-logo-1024x248.png)
Unlike the two previous tools, Grafana is not an IT monitoring solution, but a query engine! In fact, it complements system supervision as a metrology tool.
Grafana can display usage data from supervision in the form of KPIs, graphs and dashboards.
Formerly licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, Grafana is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL version 3 since April 2021. It offers a limited free version (number of users, amount of data collected, retention times, etc.), as well as two professional packages with support and higher capacities.
IT monitoring: to conclude on these three Open Source solutions
Today we presented a trio of “open code” IT monitoring tools.
However, many monitoring softwares, both open source and proprietary, coexist in most large-scale information systems. This multiplication can be synonymous with various problems: complexity of operation, increase in irrelevant alerts, lack of global visibility…
This is where hypervision begins. And that’s where Canopsis comes in, the first Open Source solution on the market.
By easily injecting your events into Canopsis, you can:
- have a 360° view of the information system,
- be proactive by detecting and responding to incidents before they become critical,
- make informed decisions to improve overall unit performance,
- contribute to the overall observability of the IS.
Ready to take the plunge? Contact our experts!