A few years ago, I was comparing Nagios to Icinga (I think it was just forked), but ultimately settled on Shinken, which is not a fork but is still Nagios compatible (both plugins and configuration).
It's been working like a champ. I will be reinstalling that server soon - does anyone have any insight on Shinken vs. Nagios or Icinga?
I am curious why configuration compatibility is a selling point, for you in particular. Is there some popular inventory management tool out there that has been cranking out Nagios configuration files?
I've been unimpressed with NConf. It's useful for what it is; I even use phpMyAdmin occasionally.
Shinken sounds interesting, but I'd never heard of it. What I'm trying to understand is why anyone would have so much invested in their Nagios configuration syntax. If you have more than a few dozen hosts, you are probably already using a higher level configuration abstraction. NConf, for example.
But once you stop counting servers by the dozens, you are hopefully using an even higher level configuration abstraction for data center management. In which case you either already committed to a Big Vendor years ago, or you'd have no incentive to switch away from a legacy Nagios deployment.
Anyone who needs to replace a Nagios deployment and prioritizes configuration file level compatibility in their new monitoring platform sounds crazy to me.
(edit: plugin compatibility is all that anyone should care about, and even that's just based on good decisions about uniform output)
I totally agree, and as I mentioned, configuration compatibility was NOT a selling point at all - I just mentioned it as a property of shinken that makes it (supposedly) a drop-in nagios replacement without even the need to reconfigure.
I see that as a selling point for testing (not relevant to me because I didn't have a previous nagios installation) - to test shinken for real, you just install it (a couple of apt-gets) and run it - you don't need to configure it.
Once you've actually decided to commit to a new system, configuration compatibility with your old system is much less important, of course (provided it's not a tangled mess of 1000 hand edited files)
I'm pretty sure everyone cares about plugin compatibility, and a few people are impressed by the finesse involved in bringing configuration compatibility.
Your point about the ease of compatibility testing is quite salient.
It's been working like a champ. I will be reinstalling that server soon - does anyone have any insight on Shinken vs. Nagios or Icinga?