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F.A.Q. Centreon Engine

What is this fork ?

Centreon Engine, is a fork of Nagios® proposed by the Centreon developers which aims to give new impetus by publishing a series of patches and new features focusing on the scheduling engine. The Centreon interface works very well and is now a reference software, for this reason we are not working on the web interface offered natively by Nagios®. The changes will therefore focus on improving performance, fixes of known problems which were not taken care of by the Nagios team for months, and new features to meet user expectations.

Why fork?

Centreon leans on Nagios® since 8 years now. For years, both software users have benefited from the work done by their active communities that wanted to democratize the monitoring. Over the last 3 years this dynamic has unfortunately been strongly slowed down on Nagios side. Ethan Galstad has indeed chosen to focus almost exclusively on the development of professional services around Nagios®. This approach is logical and entirely understandable given the heavy use of Nagios® in the world. What is less clear is the break down with his community and the more ambiguous positioning of the project developments.

These developments are very limited, Nagios® 3 is now 3 years old and not much have been done featurewise since then.
For developers mastering the C language (language of the Nagios® source code) wishing to participate in the evolution of Nagios®, it is impossible to contribute. The development area is closed and held by only few people who refuse for incomprehensible reasons to validate and record the proposed correctives.

This report that has already been made some years ago by the Icinga branch and more recently by Jean Gabes, and it has now become an alarming reality for the community Centreon. Some essential changes should indeed be made to the Nagios® engine in order to meet the users expectations. Sadly, the closure of the development team does not allow us to submit these ideas. Until now, the features of Nagios® could satisfy us but they happen to be insufficient now due to poor and sometimes inappropriate features.

These changes will not be made on Nagios’ side and contributions do not seem to be welcomed. Our option in the future is to actively participate in a third party project where our ideas are at least taken into account. We will therefore find a new way to make our project work out, whether by implementing our modification in the official version or even by creating a new project.

What will bring this fork?

By making this "fork", the Centreon developers will do everything for this project to have a new impetus with a new thinking. We want to propose a true roadmap, currently absent from Nagios®. We also wish to issue corrective releases more frequently to ensure better product support. A roadmap is already drawn for this project. It is quite ambitious and focuses solely on the needs that users have reported for several months or years. Centreon developers now have a vast experience in Nagios and have advanced thinking on the subject. A complete discussion has been made to upgrade the product on several levels:

  • Development methods,
  • Architecture,
  • Operation,
  • Versioning.


We do not want in any way deviate from the other forks of Nagios®. It will be possible to integrate all our modifications for integration into the various projects. Centreon Engine, according to the GPL v2 under which Nagios® is distributed, will remain free and open source. Its license will be the GPL v2 obviously.
We also want to enlarge our community network. If people wish to join the development, testing, validation and documentation teams of the project, they will be very welcome.

What do you want to do with this projet ?

We want to make this engine the default engine for Centreon, while keeping compatibility with Nagios®, Icinga and Shinken. Centreon development teams will be more comfortable with the implementation of new needs and thus provide the missing features without being forced to "tweak" a development at the level of Centreon to by pass a shortage in the engine.

Centreon Engine will be the masterpiece of Centreon and should be the basis of any future developments.

Do you have a roadmap?

The roadmap was drawn. You can find it on our website. Development is currently in progress.

What are the major evolutions?

The first major developments will focus on performances and configuration management. We will work in a first phase correction of Nagios® and its optimization to manage large architectures without having to have a farm of servers. Then we will work on configuration management in order to add, edit and delete configuration object without interrupting the monitoring system. Once these two points are completed, we will work on load balancing and high availability.

Wouldn’t this overlap with the Icinga fork?

The Icinga development team, which for us has brought the initial element of a revolution in the Nagios® ecosystem 2 years ago, is now focusing on developing their web interface. We thought that other important changes will be made to the "core" to fix all the current Nagios performance issues. We understand that this is no longer their priority. The work they are trying to provide at the level of their own interface does not allow them to focus on the engine.

A fork does not mean a total divergence. One day, two forks might merge in terms of ideas, code and evolutions. We try to work in our environment to bring new things to the engine. Icinga members are welcome to join our development team. Working in parallel also allows us to validate constantly the work of each others to improve quality.

Centreon Engine being under GPL v2, Icinga could very well benefit from our features and implement them to their own engine.

Will you keep the compatibility with Nagios?

This project goal is not to fully differentiate itself from the Nagios® project. Our configurations are very similar to Nagios®. Configurations, API and other elements will be maintained. However, we believe that we will soon bring new features that are lacking in Nagios.

How do you position yourself compare to Shinken?

Shinken is a very interesting project. It brings new concepts that are the future of monitoring. The revolution proposed by Jean Gabes by redeveloping Nagios® from scratch is very important work and we observe its changes from version to version with great interest.

Currently, we do not want to rely on a completely new engine that could be too young. Centreon users enjoy Nagios stability and a break up at this point is not feasible. From its 1.0 version, our project will provide high level enhancements regarding performance without disrupting the operation of the engine.

Jean Gabes is one of Centreon users for years. We meet regularly. We acknowledge the philosophy and the architecture of Shinken. Our roadmaps head for the same way.

Since version 2.2, Centreon is compatible with Icinga and Shinken engines.

Who can contribute to this project?

Everyone, as long as the project organization is respected:)
Centreon Engine is an open source project that remains open to any contribution. We seek different types of profiles:

  • Developers
  • Tester / debugger
  • Documentation writer

We regularly contact the most active persons who have a clear interest in the project in order to offer them to join the team. If you want to join us, please contact us at the following address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

What are you planning to do to sustain your project?

We will manage this project as we currently manage our other projects. This one will be open and everyone will be able to participate. We will work on much expected features that the Nagios® community does not include at the moment, such as high availability, cloud management, load balancing, a more efficient escalation system ...

We also work on more responsive community and professional supports. We do not think it is viable to deliver a project without any real bond between users and developers. Integration of Centreon Engine to Centreon Enterprise Server will also be an option that will allow the engine to be widely used.

Why should we trust you more?

With a dynamic and responsive team as demonstrated with the success of Centreon, we outstand by offering features to the core. We really want to move forward and bring a new dimension to Nagios®. Testing our scheduler is the only way to convince you :-)

Why not use directly Shinken, which is the future, rather than forking?

We believe that it will be hard for users who are already accustomed to Nagios® to move towards Shinken directly, since it is a complete change (new language, new architecture, new configuration files ...). Some people will be reluctant to take that step.
It will be easier to convince users to switch to this system if we re use Nagios and change its features step by step.

We believe that using an already proven functional and reliable system, then topping it with missing features is much safer than starting from scratch. The work and the risks are lower.

Can we go back?

Yes, since the configurations compatibility will be maximized. You simply start Nagios® instead of Centreon Engine and adjust some parameters. It is not in the interest of Centreon Engine to be too different from Nagios® for the time being.

end faq