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Cisco Intersight vs Nagios Core comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.9
Cisco Intersight provides ROI by lowering staffing and operational costs through network consolidation and reduced manual tasks.
Sentiment score
8.9
Nagios Core boosted operational efficiency, reduced costs, minimized downtime, and significantly improved productivity and disaster recovery times.
It simplifies the onboarding of new hardware, reducing time spent on manual installations and configurations.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
I have seen a return on investment, as we need fewer employees, and most of it can be done from one dashboard.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Intersight customer service is highly rated, though support quality varies due to regional differences and specific contracts.
Sentiment score
5.5
Nagios Core relies on community and documentation for support, offering valuable resources but facing scalability and consistency challenges.
For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX.
Senior Network Architect at ocp tech
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer support a ten.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
I would rate the technical support by Cisco as an eight or nine, because Cisco TAC is one of the best TACs I work with.
Team Lead for Network & Security at Secure Services Mauritius Ltd
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Cisco Intersight provides efficient, seamless scalability, allowing remote management of complex environments with adaptable policies and high user ratings.
Sentiment score
7.6
Nagios Core is highly scalable, supporting diverse infrastructures with open-source flexibility, despite some horizontal scaling concerns.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten due to its capability to manage multiple domains and automate service requests.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
Scalability allows for creating server profiles quickly, mapping them to multiple servers, and removing them when scaling down.
Technical Marketing Engineer Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at NetApp
Cisco Intersight scales straightforwardly with the growing needs of the organization.
Team Lead for Network & Security at Secure Services Mauritius Ltd
The solution is scalable.
Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Cisco Intersight is mostly stable and reliable, with some challenges in upgrades and hardware-related performance issues.
Sentiment score
8.6
Nagios Core is highly stable and reliable, offering exceptional performance on Linux with minimal plugin-related issues.
After five years, if I don't have access to the Cisco Intersight portal, how do I manage my servers if I want to conduct some test environments?
Team Lead for Network & Security at Secure Services Mauritius Ltd
Some steps are not included in the official documentation, which can create challenges.
Senior Network Architect at ocp tech
It is always accessible online, secure, and allows access from any location, following strict authentication standards.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
I tried many other solutions at work, however, in terms of Nagios, I haven't seen any disruption or downtime.
Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco Intersight needs improved migration, integration, usability, automation, and cost-effectiveness, with emphasis on stability and on-premise features.
Nagios Core needs a modernized interface, simplified configuration, scalability, and integration with tools like Grafana for improved usability.
For how Cisco Intersight can be improved, I focus on two points: visual policies, which I believe is the most important improvement, and the possibility to work with local labs in a local infrastructure.
Consultant at SOSNET
There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment.
System Presale at Bezeq
It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like ChatGPT.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
 

Setup Cost

Cisco Intersight offers competitive pricing with free and paid tiers, offset by high initial costs and complex pricing structures.
Nagios Core provides cost-effective, open-source monitoring with engineering setup and maintenance, requiring customization expertise for full benefits.
The pricing is fair and reasonable, particularly for enterprises.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
Cisco Intersight's license cost is very high compared to AWS and Azure solutions, which have lower initiation costs.
Technology Architect at University of Helsinki
The pricing is solid for what we get.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
 

Valuable Features

Cisco Intersight enhances data center management through automation, integration, predictive analysis, and AI-driven insights, reducing manual work.
Nagios Core offers extensible plugins, alerting, customizable dashboards, proactive monitoring, and integration, enhancing system reliability and minimizing downtime.
This solution has provided time savings and required fewer people to operate this tool, rather than direct cost savings.
Sr. Network Engineer at Saudi Business Machines - SBM
It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure.
System Presale at Bezeq
It also provides predictive analysis, predicting data leaks and making it easy to scale up servers remotely without requiring physical interference.
Technology Architect at University of Helsinki
You can monitor anything.
Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Intersight
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (5th)
Nagios Core
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
18th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (19th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 1.6%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nagios Core is 1.5%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Intersight1.6%
Nagios Core1.5%
Other96.9%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Technical Marketing Engineer Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at NetApp
Centralized policies have simplified hybrid operations and now support automated workflows
The challenge could be if there are any bugs. Most of the time, you may feel that the TCAM resources are getting full on the Nexus just because of some bug or the configuration is not supported. Or sometimes, if there are any vulnerabilities happening on the current running firmware, those are challenges we have. And if you talk about from the compute side, there were initial bugs such as a CPU throttle issue. Because of that, the chassis was not running in an optimum way. You may see performance issues during that time. For that, Cisco released a patch, and it got fixed. I think Cisco Intersight should allow more automation capabilities. It should be more open, and it should provide more automation capabilities. I think there is also a scope of making it a little bit simpler because a lot of policy and config sometimes becomes confusing for the user because it has a lot of config. Maybe they can do a little bit of simplification with Cisco Intersight.
HY
Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group
Monitoring solution provides comprehensive visibility across IT infrastructure
The good thing about Nagios Core is it covers everything. Everything in the IT domain, you can monitor anything. You can even monitor printers, the ports of printers, Core workstations, and storage. You can monitor the workflow Core and the utilization of computes. If you want to grasp everything of your IT equipment on a single interface, you can use Nagios. It's the best one. It provides dashboards, and you can also configure your emails and alerts with it. If something is critical, you can configure it to notify via emails. It has a very handy dashboard, providing live alerts and visibility for everything.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?
Regarding improvements for Cisco Intersight, I would say more third-party integration is needed. At the moment it does have a basic integration of Pure Storage, so I can add my Pure Storage if I ha...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?
My main use case for Cisco Intersight is to register our Cisco UCS servers and apply profiles to our servers with configurations, firmware deployment automatically, and install the operating system...
What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Intersight?
I would rate Cisco Intersight a nine out of ten. I give it a nine because personally, I think it is one of the best management tools ever. I have worked before with different server vendors and dif...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nagios Core?
Nagios Core is a free and open-source product. We don't charge for the product itself, but we charge for the man-hour costs related to installation, configuration, ongoing operation, and maintenance.
What needs improvement with Nagios Core?
The dashboard should be improved. It's very simple. I don't have a very clear or specific suggestion. You can change the skin of the dashboard, however, it's good for me.
What is your primary use case for Nagios Core?
I was a senior system administrator. I've been using Nagios Core for more than ten years now. It can be used to monitor hosts, such as machines, and monitor services of any kind. I'm using it to mo...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Intersight
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

EXMAR, RapidScale
Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Intersight vs. Nagios Core and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,817 professionals have used our research since 2012.