European Infrastructure Monitoring Software

Infrastructure monitoring software watches servers, networks, containers and cloud services around the clock. It collects metrics, checks that services respond and sends an alert when something fails or slows down. The tools on this page are open-source or open-core products from European companies: Zabbix (Latvia), Checkmk and Icinga (Germany) and Centreon (France). They are typical alternatives to Nagios and, for teams that want to run monitoring on their own servers, to hosted platforms such as Datadog. Checks of a single website or API from outside are covered by uptime monitoring services instead.

Infrastructure monitoring tools compared

Tool	Headquarters	Licence and model	Good to know
Zabbix	Riga, Latvia	Open source (AGPLv3), paid support and training	Agent and agentless checks via SNMP, IPMI and JMX, auto-discovery, proxies, high-availability cluster
Checkmk	Munich, Germany	Free community edition plus commercial editions, majority owned by the US fund PSG Equity	Grew out of a Nagios add-on, offices in Munich, Atlanta and Minneapolis
Icinga	Nuremberg, Germany	Open source (GPLv3), no paid edition	Nagios-compatible plugins, configuration as code, REST API, OpenTelemetry export
Centreon	Paris, France	Open-source core, commercial offers	Infrastructure monitoring, log management and digital experience monitoring in one platform

Which tool for which situation

Many locations and devices: Zabbix has proxies for distributed environments, and Icinga brings a cluster stack.
Monitoring as code: Icinga keeps its configuration in files that can be versioned in Git.
A free edition to start with: Checkmk has a community edition, but its commercial editions and its US-based majority owner are worth noting.
Metrics, logs and user experience in one product: Centreon combines infrastructure monitoring, log management and digital experience monitoring.

What to check before choosing

Coverage: Network devices are usually checked by SNMP, servers by an agent, containers and cloud services through their APIs. Check the plugin or template library for your own stack.
Licence and editions: Zabbix is AGPL, Icinga is GPL without a paid edition, while Checkmk and Centreon add commercial editions with more functions.
Operating effort: A self-hosted tool needs a server, a database and regular updates. Support contracts from the vendors or their partners can take over part of that work.
Alerting: Check which notification channels, such as email, chat or on-call tools, the edition supports.

What Europe does not offer

There is no European counterpart in this directory to the hosted all-in-one observability platforms of US vendors such as Datadog, which bundle metrics, logs, application tracing and security products. The European tools here are mostly built to be operated by the customer. Checkmk, one of them, is majority owned by a US investor.