We use Nagios for one of our customers to monitor all the servers, firewalls, routers, and cameras. While monitoring the server we get alerts, this enables us to raise a ticket and notify end users that we are aware of the issue before they need to notify us.
We have 80 people using the dashboard and getting the alerts. Depending on the number of servers, routers, and firewalls we are monitoring in current clusters. When one cluster goes down, it will automatically take data from another cluster.
We support 24/7 because our client is a financial company, if the critical servers go down, they would face financial issues.
The features of Nagios Core that we find most valuable are the plugins we use, we can check the uptime and see how many servers and routers and create groups accordingly. From these groups, we can check how many servers and routers go down.
We also like the alerting features. One of the dashboards they provide monitor total assets and how many are up and how many are down.
If we need to process quicker, we use third party plugins to avoid downtime.
Nagios Core would benefit from aggregations if a particular server goes down.
Comparing Nagios UI and Nagios Core, in Nagios Core we need to do some coding while Nagios XI has everything in UI. If you go with Nagios XI the developer task is minimized because they help provide the UI. With Nagios Core, we need to log into the Linux servers and we need to change that particular directory. We need to write a code for each and every server.
I have been working with Nagios Core for two years.
We deploy Nagios on a cloud, so there are features like plugins. The help desk tickets plugins so we can monitor the lock files as well from main server and create dashboards.
The security-related features also are there to monitor antivirus and install or not on each and every server.
We were working with ELK. Due to costing we switched to Nagios Core because it is free for the alerting feature.
The initial setup of Nagios Core is straightforward. We installed as per the steps mentioned in Nagios' documentation. It can be deployed in a day.
I completed the installation myself.
Most of the features in Nagios Core are free. Most plugins are free.
When considering Nagios Core you should consider how many servers, firewalls and routers you need to monitor. Then determine which services need to be monitored by Nagios Core and how many service alerts are needed so you can create clusters and keep your gig size and RAM size accordingly.
I would rate Nagios Core a 7 out of 10.