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Amazon CloudWatch vs Nagios
March 12, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
13★
CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers.
20★
Nagios Is The Industry Standard In IT Infrastructure Monitoring. Achieve instant awareness of IT infrastructure problems, so downtime doesn't adversely affect your business. Nagios offers complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services.
See also:
Top 10 IT Monitoring software
Top 10 IT Monitoring software
Amazon CloudWatch and Nagios are both, at their core, concerned with one thing: knowing when something has gone terribly wrong before it actually catches fire. They keep an eye on things, generate alarms and try to tell you, in their own special ways, that your system is about to collapse in a manner that will ruin your afternoon. They have dashboards, they integrate with all the usual suspects like Slack and PagerDuty and they both have an uncanny ability to generate alerts precisely when you’ve just sat down with a cup of tea.
CloudWatch, being Amazon’s creation, is naturally built for the vast, swirling, ever-expanding chaos of AWS. Born in 2009, it operates on a strict pay-us-for-everything principle, where even breathing near a log file might cost you money. It’s entirely managed, which means it will do things for you—sometimes in ways you never expected—and it plays exceptionally well with other AWS services, especially if you like automating your infrastructure into an indecipherable black box of event-driven wizardry.
Nagios, on the other hand, is older, grumpier and far more inclined to say, “You fix it.” Released in 1999, back when people thought the internet might actually be a good idea, it is a self-hosted, do-it-yourself affair that thrives on customization. It can monitor just about anything, provided you have the patience to dig through a repository of plugins that appears to have been assembled by a committee of caffeine-fueled sysadmins. It’s free if you like tinkering or not free if you’d rather someone else tinker for you, but either way, it demands respect, a firm hand and an understanding that monitoring is not so much a task as it is a way of life.
See also: Top 10 IT Monitoring software
CloudWatch, being Amazon’s creation, is naturally built for the vast, swirling, ever-expanding chaos of AWS. Born in 2009, it operates on a strict pay-us-for-everything principle, where even breathing near a log file might cost you money. It’s entirely managed, which means it will do things for you—sometimes in ways you never expected—and it plays exceptionally well with other AWS services, especially if you like automating your infrastructure into an indecipherable black box of event-driven wizardry.
Nagios, on the other hand, is older, grumpier and far more inclined to say, “You fix it.” Released in 1999, back when people thought the internet might actually be a good idea, it is a self-hosted, do-it-yourself affair that thrives on customization. It can monitor just about anything, provided you have the patience to dig through a repository of plugins that appears to have been assembled by a committee of caffeine-fueled sysadmins. It’s free if you like tinkering or not free if you’d rather someone else tinker for you, but either way, it demands respect, a firm hand and an understanding that monitoring is not so much a task as it is a way of life.
See also: Top 10 IT Monitoring software
