Nagios Core Reviews

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.

• 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. 

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.

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.

• Reliability
• Security
• Flexibility
• Functionality
• Availability - controllability anywhere and with different methods

When compared to earlier versions, it looks like 4.x has lost the statusmap.cgi module.

Update April 2016:

I have fixed the problem with statusmap.cgi by upgrading to version 4.1.1. In the old version this module had not been compiled.

I've used it for six years.

I have had no problems deploying it.

I have no stability issues.

I currently do not need to scale on my network.

I only have the free version, which does not have customer service.

I only have the free version, which does not have technical support.

We use Cisco ASA and MySQL devices alongside Nagios as our network infrastructure needs expanding and required more serious hardware solutions.

I believe it is hard to calculate for hardware.

I only use the free version.

• Amanda
• Cacti
• Zabbix
• Icinga (after installation).

As a rule, any device upon delivery is obsolete. Pick up the solution for your business, based on your specific needs.

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.

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.