Nagios Core Reviews

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.

Our customers like that Nagios Core is an open source solution. It can be customized to our customers' specific needs.

Cloud monitoring is an area for improvement because there aren't too many plugins available.

I've been using Nagios Core for almost two years.

It is a stable solution, and I would rate the stability at eight out of ten.

I would rate the scalability at five out of ten.

Nagios Core is an open source solution, and there are no licensing fees.

Nagios Core is a good tool overall, and I would rate it at six on a scale from one to ten.

We primarily use the solution for monitoring ops for computers and our server. We're considering adding other device monitoring as well and at points of sale.

The solution is quite efficient.

The system's alerts are quite good.

The solution is very complete and mostly easy to manage.

The latest version is a bit more difficult. There have been some changes that have not really improved the solution.

We have a new manager coming in, and they will watch and see over the course of the year if the solution needs any specific improvements. We're still in the process of testing the solution.

The implementation and deployment might need to be slightly 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.

It would be good if the solution had some sort of alarm system to alert managers to any issues. We get good alerts, they just need to get to the right person more efficiently.

We've used the solution over the last 10 months or so. It's been almost a year. We initiated the product in 2020.

The stability of the solution is quite good. We haven't had any issues per se. It's been reliable.

We haven't had any issues with scalability. If a company needs to expand it, it should be able to.

We have about 100 hosts and about 10 servers at this point and maybe 19 at the point of sale.

We don't really have technical support from the solution. We rely instead on learning the solution and focusing on documentation if we need assistance. There's also a community online that's quite helpful.

Their documentation is very complete and they have pretty good policies in place.

We did previously use a different solution. We still use it. It continues to monitor our network. We have a new CTO that is looking to make changes. We're evaluating more economical options.

The installation is initially a little bit complex.

The process took several months. Originally, we were using Linux systems.

We didn't have installers or another company assist us. We handled the implementation ourselves.

We're just customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with Nagios.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

We're still in the early days in terms of usage. We're still feeling the solution out and testing it for its acceptability within the greater framework of our organization's requirements. We're looking to test it at the point of sale to see how successfully it operates.

Overall, I would recommend the solution to other organizations.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

Gathering data from various machines easily without worrying about the underlying OS or technology.

We can get real time statistics of our servers which improves our monitoring. The integration of Nagios with other tools makes our monitoring way better than what we previously had in place.

It would be nice if it was hosted in cloud. Also, they need to improve the graphs.

I've been using it for four years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I haven't had the need to use technical support.

This is our first infrastructure monitoring tool.

It was straightforward.

We did it in-house. There is no extra effort needed if you just go through the regular installation instructions.

We are using the free version.

You should go ahead and try it.

The first most valuable feature are the notifications that can be customized and even received via WhatsApp.

Another valuable feature is the reporting. As far as I know, there's no way to cheat on the reporting, that is, there's no way to go into the system to change the results. This makes the reporting feature very reliable. The reports are also very easy to understand, which is good when I present them to my boss.

Lastly, Nagios is not a resource hog. I can set it up on a busy server and it will still function reliably. This allows sysadmins to keep server maintenance costs low.

I can give an example. It was during a seasonal festival and visitors to our e-commerce site increase several-fold. The log partition quickly filled up within two days. If it wasn't for Nagios' alerts every minute until we acknowledged the problem, our website would have stopped working. (I can't remember why the logrotate didn't work, though.)

I like to have the option to configure Nagios using the web interface. Although I agree that the CLI gives a lot of customization options, I'd like to take a break from looking at lines of words. Also, configuration via a web interface could be expanded to not-so-Linux-literate users.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

I did encounter stability issues when exploring plugins, but not with Nagios itself. Other than that, I never faced any issues on the production side.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

Since Nagios is open source, I had to rely completely on forums and web articles. However, Nagios was set up before I joined the company, so my colleagues were able to give me ample support when trying to understand how it works.

I never used a different solution because this current position is my first. Nagios was already set up before I joined the company. Nagios was already good enough for us so we didn't allocate time to research other products.

The initial setup is easy if you just follow the basic guide. The complexity comes when you want to customize it to suit your environment. For example, different plugins require different configurations. There's also another challenge in that Nagios was originally designed to monitor Linux servers but has since expanded to Windows servers as well.

It was all done by us. We were given time to do our own research and through regular testing, trials and errors, we finally implemented it. My advice is to not be scared by the need to configure everything through the CLI. It's actually quite fun and rewarding when you see your monitoring system finally up and you know you can count on it to give you a heads up on alerts before something nasty happens to your server.

Nagios is able to minimize server downtime and this in turn helps to generate more revenue.

Nagios is open sourced, therefore there's no need for licensing.

The product is robust and reliable. The notifications can be customized so that I can even configure it to send the notifications via WhatsApp! Last but not least, the reporting feature is very easy to understand, which is good when presenting to my boss.

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.