Features
Shinken can monitor all of your IT, from systems, networking to end user applications. It will react to significant availability or performance events and alert the operations team for prompt remediation. It can display metrics collected from monitored systems. It can accomplish anything Nagios® can and more. It has native distributed, load balanced and highly available monitoring. Keep reading to learn more about what makes Shinken unique.
Flexible monitoring capabilities
Monitor anything
Shinken is able to collect STATE and PERFORMANCE data seamlessly.
Active polling data acquisition with Shinken uses Nagios®’s plugins, so it can monitor hundreds of types of systems and applications :
- Classic network services (SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, WMI, etc)
- System resources (processor load, disk usage, system logs) on a majority of operating systems, including Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows.
- Databases (MySQL, Oracle, MsSQL, MongoDB, etc)
- Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks depending on requirements by using the language of their choice (shell scripts, C++, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, etc.)
- High performance data acquisition using NRPE
- High performance data acquisition using SNMP (BETA for 1.2)
- Performance data acquisition from Collectd via the network (new in 1.2)
- State and performance data acquisition using NSCA from agents, scripts or applications
- State and performance data acquisition directly from applications using Thrift (TSCA module)
- State and performance data acquisition using HTTP (Web Service)
Triggers and alerting capabilities
Identify significant performance or service problems
Shinken triggers in ALPHA for 1.2 can go beyond simply accepting the state or performance data.
- Define checks that act on performance and state data
- Redefine state of a check
- Create calculated services that have their own state and performance data (Key Performance Indicators)
- Use actual Python code to create complex rules
Shinken can raise notifications to alert administrators :
- Classic email
- SMS (with a simple phone or a SMS gateway)
- Visual dashboards
- Even Twitter notifications!
- Maintenance periods
- Escalation
- Root cause isolation for notification flood prevention
- Automatic flapping detection
- Event handlers for proactive actions
- An easy to extend design
Standardized interfaces
It is easy to share and report on your data
Shinken has modules that provide integration using standardized methods.
- Livestatus API for current and historical state data
- Module to send data to the powerful Graphite time-series databases (fixed in 1.2.1)
- Module to send data to PNP4Nagios RRD based time-series database
- Modules to export data to a variety of logging or analysis systems (ex. Splunk for Nagios, LogStash, graylog2, Kibana, Canopsis)
- GLPI – the inventory and ticketing system
- CSV Files
- Landscape – the Canonical/Ubuntu system management console (new in 1.2.1)
Simple and modular discovery module
Start in a few minutes with all your IT configured!
Shinken comes with an easy to use discovery module, able to scan your whole network and systems to help you run your monitoring solution in a few minutes! It can automatically discover :
- Systems (Windows, Gnu/Linux)
- Classic network applications (HTTP, FTP, DNS, etc)
- Databases (MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB)
- Network equipments (Cisco, Nortel)
- and more
- File systems
- Network devices
- and other services
SkonfUI - Configuration interface
Shinken 1.2 introduces a BETA web based interface to use the discovery modules and apply configuration changes.
- Uses its own multi platform Python web server (Apache is not required)
- Configure discovery runs
- Download configuration packs from the community exchange website
- Configure information about devices discovered
Prioritize your effort based on business impact
Business oriented monitoring
You can define objects dependencies in Shinken like a server being connected to a switch, a web page being dependent of a database, or your virtual machine hosted on a VMware server. A business impact can also be assigned to a service that will apply to any of its dependancies auto-magically. It allows Shinken to only alert you about the real problems and identify the involved elements. :
- Ability to filter events to the root cause automatically
- Dynamically prioritizes business impacting problems
- Intelligent dependency validation logic to eliminate event floods and false positives
- Contact notifications for service or host problems and resolution (via e-mail, pager, SMS, or any user-defined method through plugin system)
- Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
VMware auto dependency and VMotion support
Depencies are created automatically, and updated if need be!
You need to know if a VM problem comes from the VM or the ESX host. Shinken can connect to your vSphere server and automatically discover and create dependencies links between your hosts and your virtual machines!
If you move the VM to another host, you don’t need to restart Shinken, it detects the VMotion and update the link automatically too!
Libvirt auto dependency support
Depencies are created automatically, and updated if need be!
You need to know if a VM problem comes from the VM or the VM host. Shinken can connect to your server and automatically discover and create dependencies (new in 1.2.4) links between your hosts and your virtual machines!
If you move the VM to another host, you don’t need to restart Shinken, it detects updates links and dependencies.
Business rules correlation
Get a unique indicator for a whole N tier application!
Todays applications are complex, with N tier architectures. You need to have a simple answer to “Is my application running fine?”. It’s what the business rules are for.
- Ability to define complex correlation rules with & (and), | (or) operators
- Ability to define 1 to N dependancies, allowing for dealing with redundant architectures and hosts.
- Apply correlation rules based on multiple hosts and services without changing their host or services definitions
- All this is done simply with built in compatibility with your current visualization tools!
- Use business rules along with Shinken triggers to model your business applications.
Keep your Nagios® configuration and plugins !
Do not lose your prior investment in Nagios!
Shinken is a Nagios® like tool, redesigned and rewritten from scratch to meet today’s requirements of system monitoring, but still allowing with compatibility to the Nagios® ecosystem. So just stop your Nagios daemon, start the Shinken one, and your are done!
Once you are comfortable with Shinken, you can start to use its advanced features.
Scale Shinken in a few minutes, run it everywhere !
A distributed and high availability architecture by design!
Shinken architecture is it’s major strength : it’s a private cloud based monitoring system!
- Easy to configure dynamic load balancing
- Simple redundancy declaration
- Multiplatform support, like GNU/Linux or Windows, and even mixed architectures!
- You can monitor all your customers with a centralized administration!
Manage complex and secure networks
Your DMZ and distant sites are now easy to monitor
Distant sites and DMZ networks are handled by design in the architecture. You can manage all network connections, and handle any connectivity restrictions between your DMZ and internal LAN.
Shinken supports NATed environments and SSL communications. You can now have a Shinken daemon running in a NATed network and it will be able to communication with all other Shinken components. (new in 1.2)
Efficient use of your resources
Monitor a very large IT infrastructure and business services with fewer resources
Shinken allows huge configurations with lots of dependencies without any issues. It’s OK to monitor more than 10K hosts with a single server.
Run installations with 50K+ services and hundreds of thousands of metrics stored in Graphite (performance data).
WebUI and SkonfUI – The web interfaces
From simple UIs to all in one solutions
Shinken has a self-sufficient WebUI to present some of the unique features that the Shinken core provides.
- Uses its own Multi platform Python web server (Apache is not required)
- Re-engineered and features a modern web 2.0 technologies and a clean layout. (New in 1.2)
- Integrates with Active Directory and Open LDAP for authentication (New in 1.2)
- Seamlessly integrated data visualization using Graphite or PNP
- Business impact, business rule visualization and prioritization
- Dependency viewer
- State of the Shinken distributed components
- Seamlessly integrates the Shinken SkonfUI configuration and discovery frontend
- and more.
You can also choose to implement Shinken as the backend for other Nagios® compatible UIs such as :
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