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Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP): What It Is & Why Should Network Engineers Care About It

There are several factors to consider when distributing certificates to managed devices, making it a massive undertaking. These include public key infrastructure (PKI), integration, gateway setup, configuration settings, certificate enrollment, device authentication, and more. 

Thanks to the Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP), administrators can quickly and easily enroll all managed devices for client certificates without any action from the end-user.

Here we will discuss what exactly the Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP) is and why network engineers should care about it. 

What Is The Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP)?

Digital certificate issuance in big enterprises is simplified, secured, and scalable with an open-source protocol called Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP).

SCEP servers utilize this protocol to give users a one-time password (OTP) through an asynchronous, out-of-band mechanism (OOB). After creating a key pair, the user submits the OTP and certificate signing request to the SCEP server for verification and signature. As soon as the certificate is ready, the user may request it from the SCEP server and then install it.

Digital certificate issuing was labor-intensive until the advent of SCEP and related protocols like Certificate Management Protocol and Certificate Management via CMS. SCEP is widely used in big organizations since it is supported by products from major vendors like Microsoft and Cisco.

After its creators left SCEP inactive in 2010, the project was dormant until it was revitalized in 2015. Apart from that, it is presently a draft that anybody may see as part of the work of the open-source community – the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Why Should Network Engineers Care About SCEP?

The public key infrastructure provides the most secure and user-friendly authentication and symmetric encryption solution for digital identities. Yet, the ambiguity and scale of certificate deployment for most businesses can challenge their already overworked network engineers.  

Manual deploying and maintaining certificates is tedious and error-prone. Whether an organization delivers a single certificate for a Wi-Fi router or holds several certifications across all networked devices and user identities, the whole process may take up to several hours. It leaves companies vulnerable to breaches, Man-in-the-Middle (MITM), and other forms of network disruption.

Certificates managed manually are more likely to be lost, overlooked, or expire without being replaced, putting businesses at high risk. Therefore, enterprises need the automated and well-organized certificate enrollment standard – the Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP) – due to the many risks associated with administering PKI certificates manually.

The significant benefits of the Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP) include:

  • Hassle-free certificate issuing.
  • Ensuring that certificates are correctly issued and configured across various devices.
  • A fully automated procedure for the issuance of certificates. As a consequence of this, it involves very little to no human participation.
  • A protocol that saves time, lowers operating expenses, and boosts productivity by enabling network engineers to concentrate on other duties rather than doing those chores themselves.

SCEP is a flexible solution that can meet all your network management requirements since it is compatible with most devices and server operating systems. These include Windows, Apple iOS, macOS, and Linux, as well as directory systems such as Active Directory.

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About Portnox
Portnox provides simple-to-deploy, operate and maintain network access control, security and visibility solutions. Portnox software can be deployed on-premises, as a cloud-delivered service, or in hybrid mode. It is agentless and vendor-agnostic, allowing organizations to maximize their existing network and cybersecurity investments. Hundreds of enterprises around the world rely on Portnox for network visibility, cybersecurity policy enforcement and regulatory compliance. The company has been recognized for its innovations by Info Security Products Guide, Cyber Security Excellence Awards, IoT Innovator Awards, Computing Security Awards, Best of Interop ITX and Cyber Defense Magazine. Portnox has offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia. For information visit http://www.portnox.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.。

“When it comes to ransomware attacks, it’s a matter of when, not if.”

Ransomware attacks are on the rise — in the first half of 2021, the average amount paid by organizations to perpetrators of was $570,000, an increase of 171% over the previous year. (1)

Last year also saw a 93% increase in the overall number of ransomware attacks (2) – a trend that is only likely to continue. While such attacks were once limited to outlandish movie plots, they’ve become an all-too-real problem for organizations of all sizes. In fact, when it comes to ransomware attacks, it’s more likely to be a question of when, not if.

Our concern at Keepit is that the regularity of ransomware attacks may lead to them eventually being dismissed as just a cost of doing business. But by choosing to pay the ransoms demanded, companies are powering a vicious cycle where the proceeds fuel increased cybercrime. (And paying a ransom does not guarantee getting your data back, as documented in the report ‘The Long Road Ahead to Ransomware Preparedness’ from ESG)

It’s vital for the sake of commerce – and for society – that companies, governments, and law enforcement agencies come together to find long-term solutions to ransomware attacks.

In the short-term, we encourage companies to invest in a third-party backup and recovery service to minimize the threat posed by encrypted malware. The more secure your data is—and the quicker you’re able to recover it—the less worried you need to be about ransomware attacks.

At best, an attack won’t affect business continuity – it’ll just be a nuisance rather than a crisis. If you know your data is safe, you don’t have to pay the bad guys’ ransom. Problem solved.

Summing Up 

The disruptive power of ransomware attacks in 2022

An increasingly common threat, ransomware attacks are forecast to cost victims around $265 billion annually by 2031. (3) With conventional data recovery times often taking weeks or even months, the disruption to companies can be catastrophic in terms of financial costs to your business. But the damage goes beyond the bottom line. Additional impacts of ransomware attacks in 2022 are likely to include:

  • Intellectual property cost – temporary or permanent loss of sensitive or proprietary information can be enormously damaging. 
  • Business continuity – disruption is frustrating and costly as companies struggle to restore data and operations 
  • Reputational cost – a ransomware attack can damage customer perception of the company and impact digital trust. 

Why Keepit is the answer

Keepit backs up to an independent cloud, separate from your SaaS vendor’s environment, which means your data can be accessed completely independent from SaaS application availability. True backup—immutable and tamperproof on a separate logical infrastructure — is your answer to ransomware attacks. 

 

For more details about Keepit’s dedicated SaaS data protection, read about our security on our website 

References

  1. Research from Palo Alto suggests the average ransom in the first half of 2021 is $570,000 USD, an increase of 171% over the year prior; see Average Ransomware Payment Hits $570,000 in H1 2021 [Dark Reading] 
  2. Research from Check Point reports that ransomware incidents increased 93% year over year; see Ransomware attacks increase dramatically during 2021 [Computer Weekly] 
  3. https://cybersecurityventures.com/global-ransomware-damage-costs-predicted-to-reach-250-billion-usd-by-2031/

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About Keepit
At Keepit, we believe in a digital future where all software is delivered as a service. Keepit’s mission is to protect data in the cloud Keepit is a software company specializing in Cloud-to-Cloud data backup and recovery. Deriving from +20 year experience in building best-in-class data protection and hosting services, Keepit is pioneering the way to secure and protect cloud data at scale.

The Municipality of El Prat de Llobregat enables teleworking with Awingu

El Prat de Llobregat is a municipality in the province of Barcelona with a population of 65,000 inhabitants. The staff of the city council consists of 800 people, and in a first phase the Awingu workspace has been implemented to manage the telework of 50 of them.

Like most of the city councils, the one of el Prat de Llobregat had to implement new systems to cope with the need to telework due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In this case, like in many other city councils and companies, the process had to be done quickly and immediately, since the measures imposed by the Government required an imminent confinement.


El Prat de Llobregat is part of the Barcelona metropolitan area.

Remote access within municipalities
For the Municipality of El Prat de Llobregat, like many other public administrations, the digital signature is something necessary in their day-to-day work. The town hall had to make a rapid evolution to be able to provide access to the usual applications and digital signature remotely and securely.

“Using more traditional tactics like VPNs for example, is more complicated and not the best way to maintain high levels of security,” explains Adrián Russo Gallo, General Manager of Indigo, IT partner of the Municipality of Prat de Llobregat:

You have to find out who is connecting and control the device that connects to the network. Nobody is prepared to suddenly have 800 users outside the organization, it’s very complicated to have all those laptops ready with Windows 10, a managed VPN and all the required security.

Adrián Russo Gallo
General Manager, Indigo

That is why, when the Municipality of Prat de Llobregat presented its need to Indigo, Awingu was one of the candidates for a proof of concept.

Adrián Russo Gallo had known Awingu for many years, he was aware of the potential and innovative nature of the solution, but the solution was still at an early stage at a commercial level and still lacked expansion at a business level. The product was released in 2014, and at that time the demand was not quite clear. However, there were small occasions the years before, where Awingu was one of the proposed solutions. “I would say that Awingu today is the benchmark for remote desktop solutions, remote applications, … in every aspect!”

Indigo did proofs of concept in which different solutions were assessed, including Awingu’s. During the tests, since they wanted to meet all the requirements proposed by the municipality, the other solutions were gradually discarded, leaving Awingu, in which they saw numerous advantages: from the most technological part to the adaptability, security, speed of implementation, simplicity, … and a very important factor: the cost, which provides sustainability in the future. After the successful POC, technology partner Indigo bought the Awingu licenses for the municipality via the Spanish distributor MCR.

Flexibility, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness as key benefits
From the implementer’s point of view, one of Awingu’s advantages is that it is an integrator, highlighting aspects such as adaptability, rapid implementation, and its intuitive nature. That allowed the municipality to integrate certain heavy solutions from different vendors very easily. “With Awingu we found the perfect balance,” Adrian tells us.

Other advantages are the possibility of integration with Active Directory and MFA (multi-factor authentication), which is already included in the platform itself. They didn’t count on the latter, so they were grateful to have this added advantage: “It’s not that you have to integrate another MFA, because it’s already part of the product. However, if you want to integrate another one, you can do it too, because there is no impediment. Whatever you want, it fits – a great improvement!“

Another important factor is that thanks to Awingu’s adaptability, the Municipality of El Prat de Llobregat was able to set up the solution on-premise. This flexibility was not available with other solutions and was very important for the town hall: “With other solutions it is extremely more expensive to be able to do it on premise. In terms of cloud solutions, maybe there’s not that much difference, but when we set up on premise, the difference is huge.”

Another critical point had been to be able to do the digital signature, which is so important in a public administration. Fortunately, it was also possible to do it within Awingu.

Also, we can’t forget, as mentioned by Joan de la Paz, SiTIC services responsible of the municipality, that entities different from the town halls (such as sport centers, manors, etc.) are normally managed by outsourced companies or enterprises under concession with their own IT infrastructures. In this scenario, Awingu has been the perfect gateway to keep the high levels of security and control requested by the client, giving connection between the different entities under concession and their IT policies.

The advantages of Awingu not only for municipalities, but also for private companies. “If they do a good study of the technical and economic feasibility and the implementation time, Awingu will be the clear winner,” explains Adrián.

You can see that it is developed from the customer’s perspective, adapting to the customer’s needs, not the other way around as it happens in most solutions. You buy a solution and you’re waiting to see where we need to modify something, with Awingu it’s not like that: Everything is easy.

Adrián Russo Gallo
General Manager, Indigo

Next steps with Awingu
Users have certainly been very satisfied. Currently, the city council is in the first phase of implementation and will soon continue its deployment until it reaches 800 users.

Now, it is only used for teleworking, but later on, they are going to expand the project. It has been a change of philosophy and that took some time, because it is a big adaptation. Furthermore, usability has improved thanks to Awingu.

In conclusion, flexibility, speed of implementation and cost were the main reasons why Municipality of El Prat de Llobregat, together with the partner Indigo, chose Awingu to enable remote working within the public administration.

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About Parallels 
Parallels® is a global leader in cross-platform solutions, enabling businesses and individuals to access and use the applications and files they need on any device or operating system. Parallels helps customers leverage the best technology available, whether it’s Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android or the cloud.

Why You Need Backup for Google Workspace

The top 3 misconceptions made by Google Workspace admins

If you’re wondering, “is my data truly protected by relying only Google Workspace’s default backup and recovery solution,” then you’re in the right place. Cloud applications, like Google Workspace, are an integral part of our daily life – we push data to the cloud constantly. I do it when I send an email on Gmail, share a document with coworkers via Drive, or add my mother-in-law’s birthday to my Google Calendar (better not forget it again!).

But is relying on Google’s default data protection enough? What are the main misconceptions when it comes to Google Workspace data backup and recovery?

Misconception #1: Relying on Google Workspace’s default data protection is enough

If you think Google apps is a secure platform, you’re right: Google platform is a secure, resilient, and reliable solution, and protecting data is their top priority.

As much as Google will likely never lose the data you are storing on their platform, they do not cover you if the data loss happens from your side. Google’s default data protection does not protect you against human error, malicious actions, ransomware and hackers, and synchronization errors. You are responsible for ensuring the necessary protection of your data.

Based on an Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) survey, only 13% of the businesses surveyed understood that protecting their SaaS data is their responsibility, not the responsibility of the SaaS vendor.

According to ESG SaaS data protection research, 45% of organizations using SaaS attribute data losses they’ve experienced to deletion, whether accidental or malicious. When this happens with Google Workspace, Google is not able to identify if the deletion was intentional or not. The data will be deleted and totally unrecoverable once past Google Workspace trash bin’s retention time, a mere 30-days later.

You need a solid backup and recovery solution for your Google Workspace.

Misconception #2: I don’t need a third-party backup and recovery solution, I have Google Vault

As a subscribed user to certain editions of Google Workspace, you have access to Google’s retention and eDiscovery tool: Google Vault. With Vault, you can retain, hold, search, and export some users’ Google Workspace data.

Yet, Google Vault is not a backup tool. To this frequently asked question, “Is Vault a data backup or archive tool?” Google itself answers, “No. Vault isn’t designed to be a backup or archive tool.”

Based on Google’s own support website, here are reasons why you shouldn’t use Google Vault for backups:

  • Vault exports aren’t designed for large-scale or high-volume data backups. You can export data for a limited number of accounts and only for one Google service at a time. Vault also doesn’t allow many parallel exports or scheduling automatic exports.
  • Vault exports are prepared for legal discovery purposes, not efficient data processing. Vault can’t create differential backups or deduplicate data. For example, a Drive export includes all items the searched account has access to. When many accounts have access to the same items, they’re exported for each account, resulting in lots of duplicated data.
  • Vault doesn’t support all Google services. Vault can export data only from supported Google services. Vault doesn’t support services such as Calendar for instance.
  • Restoring data from Vault export files is hard. Vault doesn’t have any automated recovery tools.

Google Vault is not designed to recover lost or corrupted data and it cannot perform a which is a critical feature of any third-party backup and recovery tool.

Additionally, Google Vault does not keep ex-users’ data. For example, if an employee departs from your company and, as the admin, you delete his user Google Workspace account, all his data saved within their Vault will be also deleted. To save those data, it would require you to transfer all the employee’s data out of the Vault before deleting the account.

Misconception #3: A third-party tool can only help with backup data

By now, you know that backing up your Google Workspace data is your responsibility, not Google’s. It’s a common misconception that third-party backup solutions are a cost center purely performing secure backup and allowing for data recovery. These are the fundamentals, but there’s much more to it:

Benefit #1 – Cost savings

Budget constraints are making it harder than ever to implement new IT initiatives for IT Managers – They need to do more with less and maximize available resources.

Of course, deploying a backup and recovery solution for your SaaS applications comes with a cost, yet there are important (and substantial) cost-savings opportunities.

The first is through reduced SaaS licensing fees. Based on a recent Total Economic Impact report done by Forrester, companies save on months of SaaS licensing fees for employees who leave the organization – or around 10% of the work force per year. This number can be much higher if organizations use a lot of temporary staff or contractors. Having all historical data available simplifies data management and employee onboarding and offboarding.

The second is reduced auditing and legal costs. In the same TEI report, one of the organizations surveyed shared that seven days of auditor and lawyer costs are avoided each year by having SaaS data availability.

Benefit #2 – Regulatory compliance

Handling sensitive data is subject to stringent record retention and data reproduction requirements for all public records. With a proper backup and recovery solution, you can expect to:

  • Gain access to fast information discovery
  • Easy retention policy management
  • Additional rights to ensure compliance with applicable outsourcing regulatory requirements (e.g., extended audit rights, chain-sourcing approval rights).

In addition, data center facilities leveraged to store the data have high physical security standards and certifications (ISO 27001, SOC-2, ISAE 3402, PCI/DSS, HIPAA). It is important that you ask your vendor what they offer regarding regulatory compliance and data center certifications when investigating which tool to deploy.

Benefit #3 – Real disaster recovery

Third-party backup and recovery solutions must (not should) allow you to perform disaster recovery. The shortlist of important points to look for when selecting your solution:

  • Data availability: Get access to all your data, at any time, from anywhere. A proper backup solution provides you with unlimited storage, is cloud-based so you can always access your data, and it should reside on its own cloud for enhanced security and control.
  • Hot storage of data: Get your data on demand
  • Quick restore options for data: Restore fast, regardless of if it’s a single email or an entire point-in-time backup for your organization
  • On-the-go backup status monitor: Get updated with a mobile admin app

Keepit Backup and Recovery for Google Workspace

Keepit for Google Workspace is the world’s only independent cloud dedicated to backup and recovery. It is easy to use and keeps your Google Workspace data highly secure, always available, and instantly restorable.

Keep your data available 24/7 with automatic backup and unlimited storage
Quickly find and restore data, whether you want to restore one single email or an entire snapshot for your organization.

Easy to set up, easy to use, easy to scale
Keepit is a set-and-forget installation that is easy to use: No training needed. You can integrate it with your existing system thanks to our API-first approach. No hidden fees, no surprises, and 24/7 support.

Choose the World’s only independent cloud for immutable data
Security is in our DNA. Once your data is backed up with Keepit, it is made immutable and undeletable thanks to blockchain-verified technology. It is a priority for us to provide you with excellent reliability, great backup and restore performance, instant access to individual files, multi-factor authentication, and data encryption at rest and in transit.

Learn more on our Google Workspace backup and recovery

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About Keepit
At Keepit, we believe in a digital future where all software is delivered as a service. Keepit’s mission is to protect data in the cloud Keepit is a software company specializing in Cloud-to-Cloud data backup and recovery. Deriving from +20 year experience in building best-in-class data protection and hosting services, Keepit is pioneering the way to secure and protect cloud data at scale.

Prometheus vs Nagios vs Pandora FMS: Never before has such combat been seen!

You already know that in this house we love comparisons. Somehow you have to elucidate which is the best monitoring tool on the market, right?

Well, this time we bring you the final battle between three great ones.  Prometheus vs Nagios vs Pandora FMS. Nothing like that had ever been seen before in the ring!

Let the bell ring!

Prometheus vs Nagios vs Pandora FMS, the final battle

What is Prometheus?

Prometheus seeks to be a new generation within open source monitoring tools. 

A different approach with no legacies from the past.

*You know, for years, many monitoring tools have been related to Nagios by its architecture and philosophy or directly for being an total fork (CheckMk, Centreon, OpsView, Icinga, Naemon, Shinken, Vigilo NMS, NetXMS, OP5 and others).

Prometheus however, is true to the “Open” spirit: if you want to use it, you will have to put together several pieces.

Somehow, we can say that like Nagios, it is a kind of Ikea of monitoring. You’ll be able to do lots of things with it, but you’ll need to put the pieces together yourself and devote lots of time to it.

Prometheus is a data collection tool that works with time series data. 

Many companies that need to integrate a tool into their developments and operations choose Prometheus as their primary source of monitoring data because it easily adapts to most software architectures, quickly integrates with most modern technologies, and becomes a kind of data acquisition and management middleware standard.

It is usually integrated with Grafana to display data, as the Prometheus user interface is quite basic.

What is Nagios?

Nagios is a classic reference in IT monitoring. You can already see some previous comparisons of ours, with this tool.

What is Pandora FMS?

Pandora FMS is an all-in-one monitoring software used for both IT monitoring and integrating monitoring processes of all kinds, from IoT projects to business tracking projects.

Features

Prometheus and Nagios/Pandora FMS on the other hand offer many different features. 

The type of data Nagios works with is very closed and focuses on states, being able to collect numerical metrics. 

Prometheus in raw data. 

Pandora FMS manages both with flexibility, although Prometheus is undoubtedly the most flexible when it comes to managing open data.

Prometheus collects data from applications that send metrics to their API endpoints (or exporters). 

Nagios uses agents that are installed on servers and through SNMP checks. It has a large and heterogeneous plugin system to collect data from other sources. One of its great virtues is this ecosystem (Nagios Exchange).

Pandora FMS has a more centralized system for remote polling (SSH, WMI, SNMP, web transactions, etc.) and is much more convenient to manage by its unified web interface. 

It also allows, like Nagios, to collect logs and process Netflow data streams, which Morpheus does not even contemplate.

Reports and control boards

As we said before, the charts and dashboards provided by Prometheus do not meet the current needs of DevOps that are very focused on creating their own dashboards, charts with combined data, and generating screens that serve to show other people. 

Many Prometheus users use other visualization tools to display metrics collected by Prometheus, often Grafana.

Nagios comes with a set of dashboards that conform to the monitoring requirements of networks and infrastructure components. 

However, it lags far behind in this area. Although it has visual screens and other third-party plugins for reporting, it is perhaps one of its weakest points.


Pandora FMS, however, has excellent graphics, custom dashboards (dashboards) and visual screens (Visual Console) that allow you to customize the appearance of the collected data. 

On the other hand, its system of templates and reports is extremely powerful and flexible, especially regarding Top-N type reports, different SLAs and all kinds and examples of charts, lists and summary tables.

Nagios XI

Grafana + Prometheus


Pandora FMS

Management, configuration, operation, installation and update

Perhaps this is the big difference between Pandora FMS on the one hand and Prometheus and Nagios on the other. 

While in Pandora FMS 99% of the configuration is through a graphical interface, with Prometheus and Nagios you will have to deal with configuration files and constant reboots. 

The same happens when you want to update, it is a process that requires Linux knowledge and managing with the shell. 

In Pandora FMS, it is fully automatic. 

As for Pandora FMS initial installation, it can be done using a docker or an online installation with a single command. 

In Prometheus and Nagios the installation can be tedious although preconfigured images already exist with Docker. 

None of the three tools is click & play anyway. None is a toy that can be simplified since all three are powerful multipurpose and extremely versatile tools.

Community

Prometheus has been growing in recent years, and has more and more extensions. 

However, the leader in this category is Nagios, who remains the reference of the community and has the largest library of extensions.
Although Pandora FMS already has a large library of plugins (mostly Enterprise applications), it is behind that of Nagios.

What will you miss in Prometheus?

Particularly, reports, dashboards and a centralized configuration management system. 

An interface that allows observing and monitoring grouped information in services / hosts. 

Actually, in order to do something you will have to install Prometheus and a set of applications to integrate them together.

What will you miss in Nagios?

A centralized management interface. Wizards, customizable reports and above all, unified management of agent configuration.

What are the great disadvantages of Prometheus over Nagios or Pandora FMS?

Prometheus is designed to work with data. 

It has no statuses, no service groupings, and you will not have a view that respects a hierarchy of elements that you can associate with your organization (networks, system groups, hosts).


Prometheus is a data processing ecosystem, not a common IT monitoring system. 

Its power in data processing is far superior than that of Nagios, but the use of that data for day-to-day use makes it extremely complex to manage, as it requires many configuration files, many external commands distributed and everything must be maintained manually.

The graphical interface also does not help, as it is excessively simple and does not allow you to configure anything.

We can say that like Nagios, it is a kind of monitoring Ikea, and that Nagios is much more limited in terms of its data processing power, but much more specific when it comes to using that data for something useful and visible.

Conclusion

Comparing Prometheus with Nagios is not fair as they have different approaches, Nagios is much more prepared for traditional IT monitoring, in less time, with less complexity and with more understandable results, even though it is older technology and with a much more rigid architecture that becomes difficult to integrate with the requirements of today’s hybrid environments.

Nagios and Pandora FMS have more resemblance to each other than either of the other two. 

However, Pandora FMS integrates better than Nagios with external development processes, since like Prometheus, it also works with raw data as a source of information. 

Unlike Prometheus, Pandora FMS uses an SQL backend allowing easier integration. 

On the other hand, like Prometheus, Nagios has many “additional” interfaces that are ultimately needed to display maps, graphs, and other types of reporting. 

In Pandora FMS everything is “included” as standard: reports, dashboards, dashboards, graphics, etc.

Prometheus has two main advantages over Pandora FMS and Nagios: the fact that it is designed to be part of an integration and its ease of use by having far fewer features.

Its main disadvantage is its poor scalability and the fact that many of the features of Nagios and Pandora FMS just do not exist in Prometheus, especially in network monitoring or in reporting.

Radar-type graph

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About PandoraFMS
Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring system, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.
Of course, one of the things that Pandora FMS can control is the hard disks of your computers.

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