Maybe a strange and green question, however
Is there anything that Nagios or Ganglia can do that the other can't?
In terms of monitoring, alerts in general.
I'm looking for a general solution for my school's computer club, in my mind its like comparing norton vs advast. both are antivirus however are there any specific benefits that one has over the other? Or am I asking a very stupid question now?
thank you.
Ganglia is aimed at monitoring compute grids, i.e. a bunch of servers working on the same task to achieve a common goal - such as a cluster of web servers.
Nagios is aimed at monitoring anything and everything - servers, services on servers, switches, network bandwidth via SNMP etc etc. Nagios will send alerts based on set criteria (ie, you can set it to send yourself an email or if x service dies).
Note that they are not competing products, they are aimed at different scenarios. By the sounds of it, you need Nagios.
If you have a play around with some online demos, you should be able to get a feel for what product you need (and I think you'll agree with me that Nagios is more suited)
Nagios - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios (Wikipedia)
Ganglia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganglia_(software) (Wikipedia)