Nagios Core Reviews

• Monitoring the critical services and network environment for a large multi-site company. 
• It is also used for troubleshooting issues and capacity planning.

Nagios allows IT staff and end-users to see the status of critical services on the network. It also can alert and notify selected users if critical services fail, reducing the mean time to recover.

Availability of additional plugins like SNMP for instant alerts and PNP4Nagios for graphs make this a powerful solution.

This is the open source product, so it's a toolkit rather than a complete solution. See Nagios XI for a more complete version. 

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.

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

The poller is really good, I can easily implement new stuff and it is scalable.

Monitoring is the most important thing to avoid any production issue. It's important to get some alerts on the server and network devices. It's the day-to-day management to avoid any production issues.

I have used Nagios with the Adagios interface for two years.

I have not yet encountered any issues with deployment, stability or scalability.

I used Centreon/Nagios for eight years before I chose Nagios with the Adagios interface to simplify day-to-day configuration.

Implementation requires knowledge on the production.

There is no license cost, just a cost in time.

There is a large Nagios community for new sensors, etc.

Generally, it's an open source software, so it's free, and despite this, it covers all infrastructure health issues.

This product covers all of our infrastructure health checks, and has triggers for us to alert us to any unusual behaviour of the monitored systems. It alerts us before our customer is even aware of an issue and we can always fix it before they notice it. We can easily generate any type of notification that we went, and integrate it with other tools using any REST API which is a simple to do.

I would like to see a much better Nagios Manager GUI that can support all type of configuration items, and advance search options. They should develop a way to avoid restarting the entire application upon making any change, enable parallel checks, and improve SNMP support for SNMP traps.

I've used it for around 10 years

We had no deployment issues.

The product is quite stable, but it needs to be able to support larger amounts of hosts/services checks.

There's been no issues having it monitor our entire infrastructure.

I'm not using any customer service.

I'm not in need of any technical support.

I started with this product.

It was quite straightforward, but I would love to see an RPM package that includes all needed package dependencies.

We used an in-house team. I would advise you to learn from users past experience as it always helps.

Use the Nagios community, and go for the basic product. Design your system configuration before installing the product.

We started experimenting with Nagios six years ago to get a feel of it as a recommended network monitoring system. We tested other products like opennms, zabbix and zenoss but we finally decided to go for Nagios as it was very extensible. At that time, only Nagios could be configured to work with our in-house developed SMS-based messaging system. This is probably the greatest advantage of Nagios - it can be customized to a degree to suit your monitoring needs. It's architecture also allows distributed monitoring, which is really a great feature to reduce network traffic.

Nagios' great customizability is also one of it's greatest drawback. In the early days, installation and configuration of nagios was not for the faint of heart. You need a lot patience and system administration skill to figure out what gets into what file. This is still true today, as some still install nagios from source. Aside from installation, configuring nagios from the command line is very tedious, time consuming and prone to user errors. The core nagios installation from source does not provide an integrated management system for nagios, and you have to install these systems separately from nagios.Nagios is a great product. I would highly recommend this to organizations which requires a great deal of flexibility in terms of customizing their network monitoring system.

Though the core nagios system is still very challenging to install, a lot of bundled installers with very good GUI's for configuring nagios now exists. Instead of doing everything manually from the command line, you can just grab one of these packaged forks and get started with nagios in as little as 10 minutes.

The most valuable features are the reports and the way it generates the report in a graphical manner. The creating availability, the ratios, the uptime, downtime, and the outages.

Most of the issues have been covered through Nagios XI, but they could select some of the small features that are in the paid version and include them as part of Nagios Core.

Especially the graphical user interface in terms of configuration when you add in hosts, you have to use CAC and CLI to add hosts. You could use the GUI to add hosts instead.

The scalability needs improvement, it's not scalable at this time.

I have been working with Nagios Core for a couple of years.

We are using the latest version.

Nagios Core is a stable solution.

This solution is not scalable at all. If you want to add an AI, or if you wanted to monitor different types of metrics, you won't get the most out of it.

It's not scalable, which is important these days when you want to see more data and how your network is performing.

We have not contacted technical support. Most of the online documentation is helpful.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

I can't say how long it took to deploy as we had several deployments at the same time, but it was not a problem at all. We didn't have any issues.

We are using the open-source, unpaid version.

I would recommend it for small network deployments or if you have other open source applications or other metrics like utilization, CPU. So if you're running alongside other open source applications and in the small space, it works. But anything beyond that is not recommended.

I would rate Nagios Core a six out of ten.

We like the automatic alerting functions. Also, there are a lot of free monitoring modules available for any purpose you may need.

We've got a medium size distributed system with a lot of locally installed machines, and Nagios provides us with a solid and reliable monitoring solution for these machines.

They should simplify the features so it becomes easier to setup out of the box.

I've been using it for about five years.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Nagios was our first solution. At the time, we read that Nagios was the industry standard solution, so we chose it.

It is a complex software with many-many features, so the setup not an easy task.

We did it in-house.

We are using the free version.

The free version is good enough for most people, but it is somewhat hard to make it a working solution.