Choosing the Right Monitoring Solution for Your Infrastructure

With dozens of monitoring solutions available, choosing the right one can be overwhelming. Here’s our guide to making the right choice.

The Big Players

CheckMK

Our personal favorite. CheckMK excels at:

• Auto-discovery - Automatically finds services to monitor
• Agent-based and agentless - Flexibility in deployment
• Excellent UI - Clean, modern interface
• Strong alerting - Sophisticated notification rules

Best for: Medium to large infrastructures, hybrid environments.

Prometheus + Grafana

The cloud-native standard:

• Metrics-focused - Excellent for time-series data
• PromQL - Powerful query language
• Kubernetes native - First-class k8s support
• Community - Massive ecosystem

Best for: Cloud-native, containerized environments.

Nagios/Naemon

The classic choice:

• Battle-tested - Decades of production use
• Plugin ecosystem - Thousands of plugins available
• Simple - Straightforward check-based model
• Low overhead - Minimal resource requirements

Best for: Traditional server environments, teams familiar with Nagios.

Key Considerations

1. What Are You Monitoring?

Infrastructure Type	Recommended Tool
Bare metal servers	CheckMK, Nagios
Cloud VMs	CheckMK, Prometheus
Kubernetes	Prometheus + Grafana
Network devices	CheckMK, PRTG

2. Scale

• < 50 hosts: Almost anything works
• 50-500 hosts: Consider scalability from the start
• 500+ hosts: Needs distributed architecture

3. Team Expertise

Don’t underestimate the learning curve. A simpler tool your team understands beats a complex one they don’t.

Our Recommendation

For most traditional infrastructures, we recommend CheckMK. It strikes the best balance between:

• Ease of setup
• Feature richness
• Scalability
• Cost (Enterprise features, but has a free tier)

For Kubernetes-heavy environments, Prometheus + Grafana is the clear choice.

Need Help Deciding?

Every infrastructure is unique. Talk to us about your specific requirements, and we’ll help you choose the right solution.