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Shinken was born from a Proof-of-Concept to overcome Nagios’ inherent architectural weaknesses. The POC was proposed to the Nagios author as the new core but he was not interested. Shinken was further developed and is now a full fledged monitoring system, entirely written in Python and compatible with Nagios. Its main goal is to give users a flexible architecture for their monitoring system that is designed to scale to large environments.

Shinken is compatible with the Nagios configuration standard and plugins. It works on any operating system and architecture that supports Python, which includes Windows and GNU/Linux.

Design philosophy

Simple and easy administration
Seamless scalability of all components
Open and dynamic development
Automated software quality assurance
High level and maintainable software language – Python
Nagios configuration compatibility
Capacity to innovate the core beyond what is possible with Nagios

What does 'Shinken' mean?

A Shinken is a sharp Japanese sword that is used for cutting and combat (cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinken). Shinken can automatically “cut” the configuration and distribute it to the various components. When a new component is added or removed, the user doesn’t need to change the configuration, but just adds the component, sets a few parameters and Shinken will manage it automatically.

Why build a new Nagios core?

Shinken’s author believes that the IT reference in monitoring (Nagios) was not designed for large environments and Nagios development has slowed due to code complexity and political will. There have also been no real enhancements in the last four years in Nagios, mainly bug fixes. It needs a new start.

Shinken provides it using its innovative technology, design philosophy and multi-platform support.

What is the Shinken license?

It’s the Affero GPL. You can learn more about it on the Not just Open Source : it’s Free Software page.

Who wrote Shinken?

	CREATOR and LEADER OF THE SHINKEN PROJECT The initiator of the project is Jean Gabès (http://jean.gabes.fr). He is the author of a french book about Nagios (book description). He wrote patches for Nagios like an important patch for boosting Nagios’ launch performance for huge configurations and added the capability to override services applied on hosts over services applied on hostgroups. You can email him at naparuba@gmail.com.
	CO LEADER and CORE DEVELOPER He also wrote a book about Nagios (book description), in german. He works as a monitoring consultant at ConSol (http://www.consol.de). Without him, Shinken would be full of bugs and would not have important features such as downtime managment, status.dat export or LiveStatus interface! You can email him at Gerhard.Lausser@consol.de.
	CORE CODE REVIEWER and BUG HUNTER Grégory Starck (g.starck@gmail.com) is doing code factorizations or simplifications & cleaning, and bug fixes as much as possible. He’s also participating in the review, design and implementation of new ideas or features.
	BETA TESTER and SKONF DEVELOPER David GUENAULT develops the web interface used by administrators to configure High Availability and Load Balancing for Shinken architecture.
	Shinken WebUI developer and designer Andreas is helping in developing and designing the Shinken WebUI.
	Bug hunter and modules developer Olivier is helping in finding and solving bugs. He also developed a module that allows loading a configuration in a generic Mysql database.
	Tester / Bug Hunter / Wikier / Comment Cleaner Sebastien is a student interested in Open Source and felt in love with monitoring few month ago. He helps new users through the wiki and forums. He also looks for bugs and sometimes manages to fix them. He has also added a feature to mix Shinken and Nagios in a same database to help migration projects.
	Fully Automated Shinken manager Olivier LI KIANG CHEONG made a Linux distribution based on a Shinken core.
	WEB DESIGNER and SCHEMA DESIGNER Romuald FRONTEAU contributes to the design of the project.