Nagios Core Reviews

The most valuable feature of Nagios is its monitoring capability. Once you configure it correctly, it will help you monitor all your servers and services.

When working on ISPs, we used Nagios to monitor all our servers and network switches in the entire city. When any part of the system went down, Nagios would inform us right away with alerts. In most cases, we were able to find the problem before the client did.

We use the free version of Nagios, which needs some administrative skills in order to configure correctly. It would be great to see some of the paid features in the free version, such as web-based administration.

I've used Nagios since 2008 year, and I'm really pleased with it. It helps me a lot with my system administrator work. I used it on my local servers initially, then I started to work at an ISP where I implemented Nagios. It's still in use there.

I rarely upgrade Nagios as everything works fine. I've had no issues deploying it.

I've had no stability issues. It's been very stable.

There have been no issues scaling it.

I've never used tech support and I find all my answers on Google or forums.

I tried Zabbix and OpenNMP but I didn't like them. I use Cacti and SmokePing for detailed graphics.

A few years ago, the initial setup was complex, but now it's not. It just has some config files where you should add your host. Everything is written in the documentation.

I implemented it by myself.

You should really try Nagios. It will help a lot and I have found that it is the best buddy for system admins.

We use the solution to monitor our IT infrastructure, like servers, the network, and things like that.

I like the way the solution sends alerts and how it keeps on escalating them. I also find
the plugins by which you can easily add the divisions valuable.

I am satisfied, but I think there is a little bit of improvement that can be made.

Lessening the price point would be an improvement.

I would like to see more training videos. It is a vast product and it covers so many areas and so many kinds of devices, so I do understand that it's a challenge when you want some kind of integration, or add a plugin, to always have documentation. But, yeah, as much as possible on the documentation, if it can be done better, that would be good.

If there was more application monitoring, it would be much better.

I find the solution stable. I don't have any complaints in regards to the instability of the product. We have used this product now for quite some time and we are happy with it.

For technical support, I think I would try to rate it somewhere around seven out of ten.

No, this is the first one that we started using. There was nothing that we have to complain about here from the past experience.

The initial setup was actually done by one of the vendors so we were one of the partners who collaborated with this for the installation. We were working together to do the installation and then they handed it over to us and then we took it over from there.

In terms of advice, I'd say that you need to know what the plan is and try to understand from which direction you are going to monitor. And, to understand what additional things you'll probably want to do from your side, like putting in scripts and other kinds of automation. So the planning is everything. If there is a particular tool you want to integrate with those things have to be properly planned beforehand.

With the number of features that it has and the ease of integration, I would rate the solution somewhere close to nine out of ten.

The primary use for this solution is basic network monitoring of a MPLS network.

Nagios Core informs me when my network elements are misfiring.

The most valuable feature is the performance parameters of the system. Nagios Core ill continuous monitor the endpoint for most common parameters on an obsessive mode and that will give you a better insight into the endpoint operating conditions

Please bear in mind that the Core edition is very limited in capability/features unlike the Enterprise XI . Inspite of this limitation it is a fantastic product to use at zero cost

I had deployed Nagios Core to monitor my MPLS network endpoints like routers and switches and also my firewalls and printers

It does a very good job I must say

An analogous product if I may refer to is Spiceworks which is a free tool for IT inventory and does an excellent job of monitoring inventory and reporting on the software etc on the endpoint

The core version is no match for the XI version. But the OEM should consider introducing some of the features of the XI version in the core version so that potential customers are actually compelled to to consider upgrading to the enterprise version

Supremely stable if you right size and maintain the system periodically

My old instance still runs on a Esxi VM with zero support on the hypervisor or the Nagios system its just a 2GB vRAM and single vCPU with about 40 GB storage and handles about 70 odd hosts and runs just fine apart from the log files maintenance its easy

No vendor involvement 

Tried many other similar products all demo versions hence did not take to production

Pretty straightforward to set up and configure basic system

I did it myself so no vendor is involved

Can't say coz my cost of investment is only personal effort , no money so its 100% ROI

Zero cost for the core edition but you need to know linux based apps configuration a=in general but in this case the installation and configuration guides make things a lot easy . A bit of patience and clear thinking you may end up doing a lot more in your setup than you expected !!!!

Tried many other similar products all demo versions hence did not take to production

Definitely try it out if you have zero budget 

Even if you don't have a budget restriction please do give it a try

It has been a reliable source of information regarding the state of the servers within the organisation and the flexibility of some of the features including the command structure has been invaluable in tracking some recurring faults.

A good example more recently is where the DHCP/DNS servers kept dropping their scopes, making it difficult for users whose machines were releasing. I managed to come up with a modification to a script that could be inserted into the Nagios client (NSClient++) and checked so that an alert could be generated if the scopes were dropped to allow the administrators to immediately remedy the fault in the short term. By retaining some of the information they could also check for trending as part of their fault finding process for a longer term fix.

Some of the reporting functionality is a bit basic and configuration is a chore although by the use of NagiosQL this can be made a lot easier.

5-6 years

Beyond the usual learning curve when adopting a new package, not really, though I did need to brush up on some Linux skills including Apache so that the web interface could be seen.

None. Under Linux, Nagios is pretty stable to the point that it could stay in place and active longer than most of the servers it monitored. Since the system can self test its configuration, it is normally impossible to start Nagios with a fault present.

No.

Can't comment on this as Nagios Core is supplied without support.

This is one down side to Nagios Core as it is supplied without support (Nagios XI can be obtained for a price which includes support). There are some support boards, however, that are an invaluable source of help which I have both used and contributed to.

The outgoing system ws Network Eagle which was good at monitoring but not very good at presenting its results. Nagios was certainly a step up as we had previously needed to use a Visual Basic add on to display results which was limited to little more than a ping test display.

The initial setup involved making sure that you knew what you were monitoring, where, what and how. Once this was done it was then possible to complete a default template which could be used to set up a server. As ever, the main effort in the beginning (once the product was selected) was in designing the layout. The actual setup was somewhat laborious (as I had not yet set up NagiosQL) and repetitive but once done, the housekeeping was minimal.

This was all completed in-house.

The only actual cost was the cost of a set of feet for the display unit that was used in the service desk area. Everything else was either end of life machinery (i.e. the server) or freeware/gnuware (openSUSE Linux, the packages themselves). There is no day-to-day cost other than the usual running cost of the server.

OpsManager

Zabbix

Nagios Core is a great solution for monitoring pretty much any size of deployment but you do need to know your way around a Linux system to set it up and run it. The skills you need include knowing the Apache setup on your chosen distro, configuring and compiling GCC tarballs and some idea about configuration syntax. Adding NagiosQL makes it simpler but that also needs some fettling to get it to work reliably. It also helps to be good with Windows administration though chances are that if you are looking at this sort of thing, you may be aware of that. Nagios does not detect systems out of the box and while it can be made to use WMI, it tends to be better working with the NSClient++ service on Windows which can be made to work much like the NRPE service which does the same duties under Linux and Unix.

Alerting and proactive monitoring are invaluable. It also allows you to write your own plugin if you have no alternatives and you need to have things under control.

It sends alerts to the right people which ensures there is no delay in the correct person or team looking into issues. It's helped to reduce downtime in the production environment to almost zero. Due to this, we now spend less time on network or server administration.

Sometimes we have had downtimes because of stupid problems such as a service suddenly stopping without any reason, or a SQL server datababase or logs growing too big, and too fast, network devices failure etc. With Nagios, this has been reduced.

The configuration and reporting modules need to be improved. I'd like to have them include a basic install package, and if you don't like the packages included, have the ability to can replace them with different ones from the Nagios plug-in site.

I've been using it for six years, and we're currently planning to upgrade it.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

I'm running Nagios with CentOS 5 on one server with no problems. I'm going to update the server because of plugin requirements.

I've not had to scale it.

This was our first monitoring solution. We were looking for a way to monitor IT structure as some years ago we began deploying a few servers and switches. Over the years, computers have spread everywhere into our offices and factory, so we needed a way to check for systems/network availability 24x7. Nagios Core was a good solution to start with.

I read the manual, set up a test server, and performed some tests. After our initial setup, I then added more servers and any IP device on our network that had SNP support (switches, sensors, printers and so on). It was my first time working with a Unix environment, and it didn't take so much time to set it up.

I did it myself.

There's no licensing costs, and I feel that monitoring is not essential software for a management board, at least until bad things happen then it becomes invaluable.

Take your time to understand how it works. Then start monitoring a small number of assets in your department and then add some device/server every day. It takes some time to tune all your checks. Once done you'll have almost everything under control. I even managed to adapt some plugins to suit my needs.

Nagios is a good choice for network monitoring. It's up to you decide if you need assistance of skilled people or try it by yourself. I was curious about Linux and Nagios was a good reason to start working with it.

Extensibility is good as this makes it easy to write checks on your own. Also, it's light as since v4 it isn't resource heavy.

No IT company would survive without a monitoring system. Nagios helped the companies I've worked with to achieve an acceptable level of monitoring.

Nagios was not built with scalability in mind. It does not work in a distributed fashion, and fixing this issue would probably require rewriting a big chunk of its code. There are other solutions, born as a fork of Nagios, that do this but it would be great if Nagios could do it.

I've been using it for five years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It does not scale horizontally. We had to wrote our own web interface and puppetry to manage/view all the hosts managed by various, indipendent Nagios hosts.

It's very easy to install Nagios as its package is provided by many Linux distributions and there are plenty of documentation online.

Don't use it. If Nagios is what you already have, you can try keep using it. If you're starting from scratch, there are products that scale better and perform better, and they use the same plugin syntax as they were initially Nagios forks.

The Auto Inventory is valuable.

Automatic monitoring of any new server added to the organization.

A better UI for graphing would make it better. The present graphs are not very friendly and good to see. 

I've been using it for two years.

I needed to add a tweak to make the monitoring work. 

There have been no issues with the stability.

We have had no scaling issues.

It was a little complex.

I implemented it all by myself. 

Its free. I have not used the Enterprise version. 

I evaluated Zabbix, but found Nagios better for my needs due to its simplicity and one dashboard for all servers.

Its an awesome product to use. 100% recommended for all organizations.