Quiz Entry - updated: 2026.10.13
Which categories of tooling make up a monitoring stack, and which products fill each one?
Collection agents, a monitoring server, a time-series database, a rules/analysis engine, visualisation and alerting — each a separate job, often done by separate products.
| Job | Tools |
|---|---|
| Collection (agents / exporters) | Prometheus Node Exporter, Windows Exporter, Zabbix Agent, Datadog Agent, Telegraf, SNMP agents, OpenTelemetry Collector |
| Monitoring server | Prometheus, Zabbix Server, PRTG Core Server, Nagios, Icinga, Datadog, Azure Monitor |
| Storage (time-series database) | Prometheus TSDB, InfluxDB, VictoriaMetrics, TimescaleDB, OpenTSDB |
| Analysis and rules | Prometheus Alertmanager, Zabbix Triggers, Nagios checks, Datadog Monitors, Azure Monitor Alerts |
| Visualisation | Grafana, Zabbix Dashboard, PRTG Dashboard, Datadog Dashboard, Azure Dashboards |
| Alerting / notification | Alertmanager, Grafana Alerting, Zabbix Actions, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, ServiceNow |
Data flows through the table top to bottom: agents collect, the server scrapes or receives, the TSDB stores, rules evaluate, dashboards show and alerting notifies a human. Some products cover several rows (Zabbix and Datadog are close to all-in-one), while the Prometheus world splits each job into its own component, which is why Grafana and Alertmanager show up beside it.
Go deeper:
Prometheus Alertmanager — grouping, inhibition and silencing: the rules/alerting layer in practice.