Nagios Core vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

Nagios and VMware are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. Nagios is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.0, while VMware is ranked #23 with an average rating of 8.8. Nagios holds a 3.7% mindshare in IM, compared to VMware’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Nagios users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Nagios Core

Read 51 Nagios Core reviews

4,301 Views
3,307 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

vRealize Network Insight

Read 46 vRealize Network Insight reviews

885 Views
526 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Nagios Core

vRealize Network Insight

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

vRealize Network Insight and Nagios Core are network monitoring solutions competing in the network management category. vRealize Network Insight is favored for its comprehensive features, while Nagios Core remains popular due to its open-source nature.

Features: vRealize Network Insight offers advanced network visualization, micro-segmentation capabilities, and exhaustive troubleshooting features. It supports real-time monitoring and provides user-friendly dashboards with natural language query capabilities. Nagios Core is valued for its flexibility and extensibility, allowing customization through a wide array of monitoring plugins.

Room for Improvement: vRealize Network Insight could improve integration with third-party products, application identification, and reporting capabilities. Nagios Core faces challenges with its complex setup process, cumbersome user interface, and basic reporting tools, necessitating an easier configuration and more intuitive graphical displays.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: vRealize Network Insight is mainly deployed on-premises and is known for responsive technical support with knowledgeable staff. Nagios Core, also predominantly deployed on-premises, offers community-based support, suitable for users with robust technical expertise due to its extensive customization requirements.

Pricing and ROI: vRealize Network Insight is considered expensive, yet supports labor savings and efficient network management, providing ROI by reducing time and increasing network performance. Nagios Core, being free, avoids licensing costs but requires customization investments. Its open-source nature is cost-effective for tech-savvy users seeking to minimize expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed Nagios Core vs. vRealize Network Insight Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core vs. vRealize Network Insight

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Nagios Core

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

8th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

11th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

vRealize Network Insight

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

23rd

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

23rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Nagios Core is 3.7%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Nishith-Vyas

Tech Lead at STL Digital Limited

Valuable reporting and alert system with room for PDF export improvements

The NetEase reporting structure needs improvement, especially the availability report, which is weak. It should be generated automatically with minimal human intervention and should be exportable as a PDF. Besides that, an integrated PDF export feature for reports is necessary. Also, the alert mechanism and graphing mechanism need to be integrated properly into Nagios Core. Currently, integrating these requires advanced Linux knowledge. Integration of more visualization tools like Grafana and Prometheus for better graphing and visualization is also recommended.

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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

The tool's configuration is easy and artifacts are easily accessible through professional services and the web

The product is highly regarded, and many customers have been using it along with other VMware products like vSphere and VMware vCloud Usage Insight. However, recently, there's been a trend among customers, especially those using VMware for a considerable period, to explore the potential of migrating to the public cloud. The common concern among these customers is how the VMware products will perform in the public cloud environment. Migrating instances from VMware to different platforms is not easy, especially when dealing with many instances across multiple customers. Customers are keen to maintain the functionality of their existing VMware products but prefer to run them on the public cloud instead of on-premise servers. Our clients for vRealize Network Insight are enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is quite efficient."

"The most valuable feature of Nagios Core is the ability to check the availability of the server for network connectivity. Additionally, the interface is good."

"Other products are good but from the configuration point of view Nagios is really very lightweight. The price is really good in my opinion. Another important thing is that my Nagios engine still works with Dual core 8GB ram for the last 10 years."

"It has made the life of the network operations staff more proactive in managing the resources of the infrastructure. It prevents disasters long before they can take place."

"The most valuable feature of Nagios Core is it allows us to develop and add as many plugins as we want."

"Nagios Core is very configurable. Whatever you want, you can do it."

"Nagios monitors our servers, so we know if anything goes wrong and can solve the problem before it happens."

"Nagios Core integrates with tools like Splunk, Datadog, or Dynatrace. It is usually used as a feed to provide more technical information about devices or hosts to another system."

More Nagios Core pros

"If we deploy NSX it shows us how the workflow will flow in the organization, what the roadblocks are, and what we need to do to overcome those hurdles. When we run this product, it gives us reports which describe problems with physical switches. We work with the network team to get them all resolved."

"As a troubleshooting tool, it's a level-3 troubleshooting-skills tool and it's very easy to use and very easy to find the information that you need."

"The solution is extremely intuitive and user-friendly. When you log in to the application you are presented with a dashboard that is very reasonable for an initial user, and you can then customize it to your specific needs. But for all the data that we've found, we've only had to go through two or three drill-downs to get into that information."

"It allows us to see how the network devices function as well as to see network glitches or fluctuations or dropping of packets."

"With this product, we can precisely identify communication patterns between virtual machines within our data center, whether it's east-east or east-west communication."

"The most valuable feature for me is the different views that you can get when selecting an application or a VLAN. It shows you the traffic flows. It gives you a visual representation of something that, in text, just may not make as much sense."

"A lot of time is saved when you use this type of software solution for the network. We have moved systems into the new data center and the servers and systems are much faster because of the very low latency between virtual machines."

"I find it user-friendly and intuitive. With the GUI interface that we do use on a regular basis, it's easy to navigate, it's easy to see, easy to query. We get reports. It's easy to use."

More vRealize Network Insight pros

Cons

"The core version is no match for the XI version."

"The alerting mechanism in Nagios Core could be improved."

"We're using the free version, which limits us in terms of the things that we can do. If we had the paid version, a lot of our issues would probably go away. For example, we can't isolate instances that are being built or updated with the production ones. When they're being built, on Nagios, they're showing in red. It'd be nice to be able to partition those off until they're all green, and then we can bring them into the environment. This is probably because we've got the free version and not the paid version. If we went for the paid version, it would probably allow us to do exactly what we want to or remove the restrictions that we have, but if we are able to isolate instances in the free version, it would make life much easier."

"Would benefit from aggregations if a particular server goes down."

"The dashboard and monitoring features could be improved."

"It would be nice if the company offered a sales or contract manager that was dedicated to our company so that we would have some sort of link to Nagios, and if we had issues or questions, we'd be able to contact them directly."

"The tool needs to improve the integrations."

"The UI is a little outdated and graphics could be displayed in a better way."

More Nagios Core cons

"After Broadcom acquired VMware, I would rate their support at five or less in many cases. It's difficult to find necessary documentation, open tickets, and get support."

"I'd like to see better support for being able to search the hardware NetFlow data. It ingests fairly well, but you can't tell, in a lot of cases, what source the data came from. I'd like to see more support for picking specific sources. That way you could really make a compelling use case. There are also some difficulties where it can't exactly trace the path between source and destination but if you hit the reverse flow on the same search it shows the entire path."

"When we talk about those micro-segmentation rules, there's an Export function. It is very macro-segmentation oriented instead. So if you choose an application, it will find the tiers within that application and say that it's communicating on, say, port 80 to a separate VLAN. There might be 200 machines in that other VLAN. You don't want to open port 80 at all of them. So we need a lot more granularity in those suggested firewall rules."

"The product is slightly complex use, while still being user-friendly. It could use more training modules, as it is not a straightforward product."

"I would like to see more interoperability on the firewall and low balancer sides."

"The UI, even though once you get to know it, it's easier, still it's hard to figure out by yourself. You have to go read, watch videos. It has a lot of data on it. So that is an issue."

"If it had some kind of plugins with vSphere, more effective plugins with Horizon View or other VMWare products, if it had interconnectivity, I think it would be more effective than it is today."

"If it were more application-aware, more descriptive; if it were able to determine the application that is actually doing the communication, that would be easier. More application information: which user or account it's accessing, is it accessing this application, doing these calls, if it is accessing a script, what script is it accessing. Things like that would provide deeper analytics so I can track what's going on. It would not just be, "These people shouldn't be talking," but who is actually doing these calls."

More vRealize Network Insight cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Most the plugin features are free."

"It's free."

"I would rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The solution is expensive."

"Nagios Core is free to use."

"The Nagios Core (PNP4Nagios + Core) is free and can be setup by Netadmin within a few hours. The only additional cost is the cloud server."

"It's free."

"The enterprise version has technical support. The version we are using is free."

More Nagios Core pricing and cost advice

"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."

"It's a little expensive, but for what you're getting out of the product, you often see the trade-off. It depends on the type of licensing you have. It might be a little too pricey for some."

"The solution has helped us to reduce time, increase performance, reduce costs, and even easily manage networks. We are probably seeing 10 to 20 percent labor savings because we are able to be very specific and focused on what we want to do. It ends up saving the customer money and makes us be more efficient on our cost deliveries."

"The solution has reduced the time that we spend on other products. For example, with NSX, we were able to quickly find things that we would normally spend days trying to figure out."

"Cost always has room for improvement, you could always make it cheaper. But I think it's a good value for what you pay for it."

"It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly."

"They should include the product in NSX because it's important to have it for deployment."

"It's an expensive product because we have a lot of nodes."

More vRealize Network Insight pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Nagios Core?

What I like about Nagios Core is that it helps me ensure everything is running smoothly by checking the status of hosts and services.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about vRealize Network Insight?

The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?

Broadcom is known for increasing product prices, making them expensive compared to what people used to pay. I liken the subscription model to not truly owning what you pay for.

See all answers

What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?

Right now, I do not see a specific area for improvement. My main concern is understanding the intentions of Broadcom, which has acquired VMware. Broadcom should improve by going back to what was wo...

See all answers

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Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core

March 2025

Download Nagios Core product report

Buyer's Guide

vRealize Network Insight

March 2025

Download vRealize Network Insight product report

Also Known As

No data available

Arkin

Overview

This is IT infrastructure monitoring's industry-standard, open-source core. Free without professional support services.

Nagios

VMware vRealize Network Insight delivers intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security. It helps customers build an optimized, highly-available and secure network infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. It accelerates micro-segmentation planning and deployment, enables visibility across virtual and physical networks and provides operational views to manage and scale VMware NSX deployments.

VMware

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel

NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core vs. vRealize Network Insight

April 2025

Free Report: Nagios Core vs. vRealize Network Insight

Find out what your peers are saying about Nagios Core vs. vRealize Network Insight and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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