Shinken is free and open source computer system and network monitoring tool, inspired by Nagios and compatible with it. Shinken aims to monitor all IT, including network services, host resources, end user applications, etc. In case of any availability or performance errors it alerts the administrators and displays metrics collected from monitored systems. Shinken has the same functionality as Nagios and even more.
Shinken can run on Linux, Windows and has support for native messaging API in Android OS. Shinken is written in Python and contains many useful Python modules to extend its capabilities, e.g. Livestatus API, ndo, pnp, sqlite, etc. Other supported integration modules include Graphite time-series database, GLPI, MongoDB, memcached, redis.
Shinken has simple plugin design that enables users to build their own service checks using different tools, including C++, Python, PHP, shell scripts, Ruby, C#, Perl. Also Shinken allows to develop new services and performance data by calculating KPIs from State and performance data.
Shinken covers both active and passive monitoring methods for different types of systems and applications. Among network services Shinken monitors are SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, ICMP, SNMP, FTP, SSH, as well as databases: MySQL, Oracle, MsSQL, MongoDB, etc. Such host resources as processor load, disk usage, or system logs can be monitored on all major operating systems, including Windows. Remote monitoring is supported via SSH or SSL encrypted tunnels.
Shinken features dependency viewer, business rule visualization and prioritization. Since it uses multi platform Python web server, Apache is not required. Shinken can be integrated with Active Directory and Open LDAP for authentication.
Shinken has WebUI and SkonfUI web interfaces. These efficient system external interfaces can export data to graphing modules (PNP4Nagios, Graphite, and others available) and export event data to logging systems using syslog and RabbitMQ. Shinken contains livestatus compatible API that exposes state, configuration and performance information.
Shinken can use notifications to alert administrators about any service or host problems via simple email, pager, SMS (with a simple phone or a SMS gateway), visual dashboards, Twitter notifications, or any user-defined method through plugin system.
Shinken has support:
- for UTF-8 objects names,
- for monitoring multiple customers with one administration point,
- for recurring downtimes through the maintenance_period attribute,
- for advanced template system with inheritance and overloading.
Shinken has ability to filter events to the root cause automatically, to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution and to redefine the severity of an alert based on regular expression rules. Such features allow Shinken to dynamically prioritize business impacting problems and alert administrators only about relevant issues.
Shinken is native distributed, load balanced and highly available monitoring software with an open and test-driven development approach. Use it to control performance of your computer system, network and web services.