Nagios Core Reviews

The main objective to use Nagios Core 4.x is to save significant costs on Infrastructure Monitoring without compromising the monitoring parameters.

So, deploying Nagios Core 4.x  was the only option for me considering the below-listed positive factors.

1) Working on Nagios Core for more than 10+ Years.

2) Good Hands On skills to cover the standard monitoring parameters such as CPU, Memory, Storage & Running Services.

3) By introducing NCPA Agent, further monitoring became very smooth & saves time as NRPE & NCPA Client Side Configuration takes more time. On the other hand, NCPA Installation is very straight & you just need to provide a unique token only.

4) NCPA Agent is available for Windows & Linux like OS environments with most of the current & previous stable kernels.

5) Presently, more than 500+ nodes & 2500+ services are under active monitoring.

The monitored services are as follows.

1) Windows & Linux Nodes

* CPU Utilization (%) & Allotted CPU Cores.

* Memory Utilization (%) & Allotted Memory (MB/GB/TB)

* Total Storage Utilization, Allotted Storage Space & Available Storage Space (MB/GB/TB)

* Running Services, CPU & Memory Utilization (%) by a particular service.

* Start the monitoring service if Nagios finds it SHUT.

2) Cisco Nodes (Switches, WLCs, APs, Routers)

* CPU & Memory Utilization.

* Bandwidth Utilization (Combined & on individual interface as well).

* Cisco WLC: No. of connected APs, CPU & Memory Utilization & Bandwidth Monitoring.

* PING RTA, Jitter & Packet Loss.

* Temperature, Free Interfaces, IOS Version, Switch Stack Status.

3) Services

* DNS/Domain Name Expiry

* SSL Expiry

* Many More...

By integrating below-listed add-ons with Nagios Core, the end-to-end monitoring become more useful. 

1) PNP4Nagios

2) NagVis

3) Nagios BPI

4) NagView 

5) NagDash

6) check_mk livestatus

I was a senior system administrator. I've been using Nagios Core for more than ten years now. It can be used to monitor hosts, such as machines, and monitor services of any kind. 

I'm using it to monitor my databases. I'm using the Netgear Core to monitor my web URLs and web servers. I'm using it to monitor my application servers. I'm using it for everything. As I told you, it's a very simple and very effective monitoring solution.

The good thing about Nagios Core is it covers everything. Everything in the IT domain, you can monitor anything. You can even monitor printers, the ports of printers, Core workstations, and storage. You can monitor the workflow Core and the utilization of computes. 

If you want to grasp everything of your IT equipment on a single interface, you can use Nagios. It's the best one. It provides dashboards, and you can also configure your emails and alerts with it. If something is critical, you can configure it to notify via emails. 

It has a very handy dashboard, providing live alerts and visibility for everything.

I use Nagios Core for monitoring purposes only. I have added enough extensions to the Nagios Core, and the company does not want to add any new features because whatever I have added is completely worth it. I have created Nagios Core projects to improve its functionality, and we use it to monitor more than 2,500 services, servers, virtual machines, and network devices in a 24/7 environment. We also use it for email alerts and SMS alerts.

We have a lot of integration tools available in Nagios Core, such as the alerting mechanism via WhatsApp, SMS gateway, and email alerts. They work pretty well, allowing us to react promptly to any issues.

I use this solution to monitor my network. There are 25 agents in my country. This solution sends me notifications if any equipment is down.

It's deployed on-premises. I'm currently using version 4.3.3.

There are five people in my company who use this solution.

This solution is very important in my organization because it lets me see all the traffic passing through my network.

We primarily use it to offer system-style monitoring for internal customers. We usually use a tactical solution to solve problems in the monitoring space for devices and hardware or for things that need monitoring.

It is a powerful monitoring tool that uses a catalog of different plugins. It's easy to configure, although I prefer Nagios XI because it's configurable through the web interface. With the core product, you need to ensure that all the configuration files are set up correctly.

I use the solution to monitor the network and some servers.

The solution's most valuable feature is that it offers proper alerting capabilities. It took some time to get the tool's alerting feature to work as expected, and it could be used after some customization and the automation of the configuration.

The most valuable features of this product are the very lightweight code and easy-to-manage plug-ins.

Apart from the main Nagios core engine, one can add several APIs and add-ons to make the Nagios engine more stronger without compromising it's performance.

Each config parameter can be easily tuned as per individual's need. Many proven frontends are available to get performance related output from the Nagios engine.

Also, Nagios can work without any database back end. It generates a single file for each day and maintains it in a separate directory until a Linux System Admin removes it manually. In Nagios terms, it is called archiving. When someone wants an availability report for a particular server for the last year, Nagios simply fetches all of the relevant files and outputs the data within the shortest period of time. There is no need to query any database to get historical data, which puts extra burden on CPU and memory.

Using Nagios, I'm managing more than 1000 services, which involves the following operating nodes:

• IBM AIX
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• HP-Unix
• Windows enterprise-grade OS
• Cisco router/switches
• FortiGate and WatchGuard firewalls
• APC UPS systems
• Many more...

The majority of the above nodes support SNMP v1/2, thru which one needs to tune up the monitoring plug-in as needed.

My main use cases include monitoring of servers and services. Some of them are outside our network and some are inside the network.  

Nagios Core sends notifications when things are out of sync. However you set it up, t will send a notification. So that's the notification that we're looking for.