.. _about/about:

==============
About Shinken 
==============


What Is It? 
============

Shinken is a resilient monitoring framework. Fully scalable, it supervises hosts and services from an IT and business point of view. Alerting or taking action on failures and recovery.

Shinken is compatible with `Nagios`_ configuration, plugins and interfaces. It is written in `Python`_, so it should work under all Python supported platforms.

Some of the many features of Shinken include:

  * Web 2.0 Interface named WebUI that has innovative methods to visualize the state of your systems
  * Livestatus networked API module to provide realtime access to performance, status and configuration data
  * Providing operational or business insight
  
    * Ability to map business processes to Hosts and services
    * Ability to associate a business impact metrics to any warning or outages of hosts and services used to deliver a business process
    * Ability to define network host hierarchy using "parent" hosts, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
	
  * Monitoring Hosts and Services
  
    * Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks
    * Monitoring of network services ("SMTP", "POP3", "HTTP", "NTP", PING, etc.)
    * Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, etc.)
    * Hundreds of Nagios check scripts to choose from
    * High performance plugin modules integrated in the distributed daemons to easily extend the scope of the software
    * Designed for highly available and load balanced monitoring
	
  * Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, SMS, pager, or user-defined method)
  * Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
  * Integrates with PNP4Nagios and Graphite time-series databases for storing data, querying or displaying data.
  * Supports distributed retention modules, caches and databases to meet persistence and performance expectations


System Requirements 
====================

The :ref:`requirement for running Shinken <gettingstarted/installations/shinken-installation#requirements>` are the Python interpreter and the pycurl python lib.

Licensing 
==========

Shinken is licensed under the terms of the `GNU Affero General Public License`_ as published by the `Free Software Foundation`_. This gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify Shinken under certain conditions. Read the 'LICENSE' file in the Shinken distribution or read the `online version of the license`_ for more details.

Shinken is provided AS IS with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING THE WARRANTY OF DESIGN, MERCHANTABILITY, AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

The Shinken documentation is based on Nagios so is licensed under the terms of the `GNU General Public License`_ Version 2 as published by the `Free Software Foundation`_. This gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify Shinken under certain conditions. Read the 'LICENSE' file in the Shinken distribution or read the `online version of the license`_ for more details.

Shinken is provided AS IS with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING THE WARRANTY OF DESIGN, MERCHANTABILITY, AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.


Acknowledgements 
=================

A long list of people have contributed to Shinken. The THANKS file included as part of Shinken and the project page at http://www.shinken-monitoring.org provide more details.


Downloading The Latest Version 
===============================

You can check for new versions of Shinken at http://www.shinken-monitoring.org.


.. _Free Software Foundation: http://www.fsf.org/
.. _online version of the license: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl
.. _GNU Affero General Public License: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.txt
.. _Python: http://www.python.org/
.. _Nagios: http://www.nagios.org
.. _GNU General Public License: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl
