Centreon vs smartmontools

Centreon is an IT monitoring platform for infrastructure spanning cloud environments and edge systems. It monitors servers, networks, cloud environments, and applications, with more than 700 connectors for areas including infrastructure, security, databases, middleware, and OT systems. Deployment is available as SaaS or self-hosted software. Integrations include ServiceNow, JIRA, GLPi, EasyVista, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Telegram, PagerDuty, and OpsGenie; stream connectors can send metrics and events to Elastic, Kafka, and Splunk. Access controls include fine-grained permissions, SAMLv2 identity-provider integration, and Active Directory and LDAP synchronization. Centreon uses TLS-encrypted communications and supports secure collection through its monitoring agent or poller. The agent monitors Linux and Windows hosts and streams metrics over encrypted gRPC. The core platform is distributed under the Apache license, with GPLv2 applying to some files. The free plan covers up to 100 hosts; paid plans start at €2.27 per host, and Centreon Cloud has a 7-day trial for up to 125 hosts. Centreon Experience Monitoring offers a separate 30-day trial.

smartmontools is a free package containing smartctl and smartd for controlling and monitoring storage devices through SMART. It supports ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS, and NVMe disks, as well as SCSI/SAS tape devices. smartctl can report SMART health status, show capabilities such as error logging and offline surface scanning, display vendor-specific attributes, start device self-tests, and read their logs. A failing health status can mean a device has failed or predicts failure within 24 hours. smartd periodically monitors SMART status, error and self-test logs, and attribute changes; it can schedule tests and report errors and attribute changes to syslog. It also supports warning emails and executable commands. The project says it should run on modern Linux, BSD variants, macOS, Solaris, Windows, Cygwin, OS/2, eComStation, and QNX systems, and can run from various Live CDs and DVDs. The package uses the GNU GPL Version 2 license and was originally derived from the Linux smartsuite package. Its capabilities focus on SMART health reporting, testing, and ongoing monitoring.