Nagios XI Reviews

We have installed  Nagios Core and Nagios XI on many customers in Latam successfully. A good use case was one customer with many servers (upper 1000) and many routers and switches (upper 2000), they wanted to monitoring operating systems and switches ports, Nagios worked like to swiss watch.

With Nagios, I can monitor since a phone on a desk to very big servers of any company. Also, I can monitor a software made in-house to software of bigger companies. Nagios is great for verify quality and quantity in a datacenter. Nagios can show if there are problems showed behavior in datacenters.

The community, Nagios XI is made on Nagios Core base, and the community makes plugins on almost any language of programming. Nagios is not owned by any brand.

The second feature is Nagios is very friendly, if you can customize the tool to the specific environment.

If you want the best security: Log Server is better. If you need in-depth networking, I recommend Network Analyzer. If you want any other implementation of Nagios, the best is Nagios Fusion.

More than ten years.

Nagios is very stable, We haven't reports on problems with the Nagios servers in never opportunities.

You should be careful when you monitor many hardwares with many softwares, the performance of one license could be compromised. You need to manage more than one license if you have an infrastructure which is very large.

10 out of 10.

Yes, I have used other solutions. I switched to Nagios, because Nagios is not linked with any brand that's independent. This is good because you can monitor any brand of switches, routers, servers, central phones, etc.

The initial configuration is very easy. The complex is customizing the solution.

We are an expert consultant, who implements for customers.

It's complicated answer this question, but the ROI depends on Datacenter.

It is good to contact experts for advice about what is the best solution for your specific infrastructure and enterprise.

I evaluated Zenoss, Zabbix, SolarWinds, and other solutions.

You will need an expert consultant for the best implementation.

Private Cloud

Other

The main characteristic I adore is the open source character of it. You want to monitor a specific metric that nobody else has? You can do it even with the most basic of scripting skills, and you can always share it with the vast community of Nagios Exchange.

Like any monitoring tool, it gave me insight into multiple infrastructures I've been a part of, without any limitation (due to the open-source character that I referred to above).

It's more what I personally don't like, rather than what areas need improvement. For example, the PNP4Nagios plugin not working easily with XI is an issue for me, because some open source monitoring plugins do not work out of the box. But in the end, you learn to live with it.

I've been using Nagios since about 2005. I've seen the development path through the open-source version (and some other forks of it like Icinga and OMD) but for the last four years I've been entirely using the XI branch.

On older versions I had some minor issues. Currently, to be honest, it is as stable as I could hope for a monitoring tool.

Up to now, the infrastructures I've been a part of were not so large, up to 200 hosts and 1300 services. Even for XI which uses MySQL on the back end, a host with 8GB RAM and four vCPUs is adequate.

With the open source forks, the community is vast and so is the knowledge around the product. Because of this, even though I have a valid commercial support bundle, I have never had the need to use it.

No, I started with Nagios. I've used other apps also like Microsoft SCOM (which is not very good), Zabbix (which is very decent), Tivoli (which is also not very good), HP OpenView (which is vast and requires almost a duplicate infrastructure to run to its full extent), Icinga (a very good clone), Centreon (haven't used it much but it seems solid enough), but I've always ended up using Nagios.

For the latest versions, for me, it is pretty straightforward.

For the cost of the commercial product and support, and taking into account the open source characteristics of it, I believe it is difficult to a better value. Yes, it needs some time to configure and address its issues, but seriously, which monitoring solution does not?

Before going to Nagios XI (commercial, meaning with support), because of the relationship my company had with Microsoft, I evaluated also SCOM. As with Nagios, I went through the whole installation and configuration process. Because of my previous knowledge, I directly compared it with Nagios, and the latter won, hands down.

Be prepared to put some time into it and research it appropriately. If there is an option for consulting services through the support channel, don't be afraid to use it.

The High Availablity feature is the most important. I have not seen Nagios crash during the last three years. The Script Module in Nagios is really easy to use and is really cost efficient.

This solution provides 24/7 monitoring of the IT infrastructure and provides real-time monitoring for the devices, with alerts.

The reporting part should be made simpler. While we can obtain all the reports we need, we always have to create work-arounds to get them.

I have used it for the last three years.

The only issue faced is that after 20K services Nagios starts acting weird, due to the amount of checking it does and the amount of data stored in the database.

No, there is no issue with scalability.

As I am working from Asia, and Nagios is based in America, we face the issue of time zones. But overall, trouble shooting and support from the Nagios technical team is superb.

I have worked on various tools in past like Spiceworks, Idera, and ManageEngine. We switched to Nagios for lower cost and good performance.

The setup is really easy and can be done by any non-technical person as well. Nagios also provides an OVF for ESXi and VMware, which has everything set up; makes life easy.

The pricing is really cost efficient. The licensing is perpetual and can be renewed very easily.

We evaluated ManageEngine, Solar Winds, Idera and Check_MK.

The over all performance of the product is superb. Just keep in mind during implementation to keep the hardware strong, according to the environment you are monitoring and based on the check Nagios is going to perform.

Nagios enables you to choose to have either a single server structure or multi server net. This helps you get the best optimization in a non-local datacenters, or remote servers on subnetworks.

I once worked on a project for a consortium in a mixed setting with Windows and Linux machines. We have integrated Nagios servers in each of the 120 head offices with different specifications. It is used for the monitoring of more than 1300 servers and 16000 clients with different sub-networks and many different applications in a closed environment. The servers of their head offices were configured to propagate the data to the primary Nagios server of the main control center, and to this mirror in the operative center and to the mirror it in the disaster recovery center.

They need to develop a better integration with a common ticketing system will be great. Once I built a complete integration with OTRS:ITSM and Nagios using the Samba LDAP database as the registry for user and machines in the software. It was a complex setup, but functional and could probably work in an Active Directory environment as well, but a fully-functional bidirectional bridge engine will be great. Nagios Enterprise has Nagios Incident Manager software but sometimes you need to work on preexisting systems with strong customizations.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Nagios is the best software of its kind if you have time for configure any host and network, and you can do quite everything with a bit of scripting. It is well documented, scalable and modular, as well as being good for a small business and for an enterprise environment. Take your time to study the product and test the agents first; be very careful on the traffic generated by agents and server-to-server communication.

I think that the most important feature of Nagios is that you can write your own plugin, so you are able to create your monitoring system based on what you need.

For example, I'm using a backup system that writes in a file when it's done. If this file is empty it means that the backup fails: well i've written a Nagios plugin to check this so i can be sure if a backup is ok or not.

We're managing servers and services that needs constantly monitoring so I've implemented a monitoring system Nagios-based to alert me when something bad happens. For example, if a server goes down this system sends me a notification When a service becomes critical, it notifies me so i can check. This improve our time to handle problems and can make us proactive to customers.

I think that the community needs to concentrate development to get a standard GUI (Adagios is a side project) and gives the user a better notification system. For my system, I've developed the notifications because it basically just sends you an email.

I tested Nagios at university for seven years, and have been using it intensively for three years.

It has no particular needs or configuration to works well. Actually i'm using it in a virtual environment with a Debian-based OS.

There have been no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues scaling it.

Customer Service:

I haven't had to use it.

Technical Support:

I haven't had any need to use it.

Nagios setup is very simple. You can find some problem during plugin configuration or host configuration if you don't use a GUI like Adagios. If you use both it's easy to setup and configure your host and services.

I implemented it in-house.

The ROI is absolutely linked to time. You can save a lot of time using Nagios monitoring because otherwise you need to check all of your services or system one by one.

There are several alternative to Nagios like Icinga (which is a 2.0 Nagios son), Observium, and LibreNMS. If you need only an SNMP monitoring system or you need real time graph Observium is your choice but Nagios is a complete solution.

The only advice is to be patient and creative because you can control everything you can need with Nagios.

The product for which Nagios was used to monitor was:

• Brightmail back-end 7/24 Operation
• Brightmail heuristics engine and development infrastructure

The ability to write your own plugins is the most valuable feature, but also it's nice that you can rudimentary monitoring primarily for Linux systems right out of the box.

We spend less time verifying that everything is up and running as Nagios does that for us leaving us time to do the other things. When something does break Nagios directed you quickly to the cause. With Nagios enabled, disruptions were less frequent and attended to more quickly.

Scaling Nagios to cover multiple regions or data-centers is challenging. It requires another tool which I never incorporated. Due to this gap I used a dedicated Nagios servers within each specific operation.

I've used Nagios since 2000. Before that it was called BigBrother and NetSaint which I hadn't used.

Implementation on Windows was painful. Also the use of NRPE can be problematic as its generally not inherent is OSes.

We have had no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

I didn't use customer service and technical support for Nagios. Everything I did I learned online through the extended community.

Prior to using Nagios for monitoring we had grown our own monitoring solution which latter became the company NOCpulse and was picked up by RedHat. Previous to that I used various other homegrown monitoring methods.

The initial setup is straightforward, but you need to have a good grasp of the underlying files structure. All the pieces are there but without this understanding where to put things is not entirely intuitive.

I always installed Nagios by myself. I never used a team. Advice I would have is you need management buy in. More than a few times I would implement this solution but without managements support it got little traction upfront. Meanwhile management pursued pricey solutions which were cumbersome and had long implementation cycles.

I can implement Nagios is a day for a medium sized (500 units) operation. Since the cost is zero and it can use a fairly cheap server to run on the ROI is nearly immediate.

Currently I use New Relic and Munin to track and maintain the operation I run. New Relic however isn't designed to alert like Nagios and they have told me as such.

Find a site where Nagios working and look at their implementation. Understand the file structure, dependencies and implementation. Start with the basics and add as needed. Identify what needs to be monitored and why.

Also, Nagios does not do trending/graphing well. I used the Nagios version of MRTG and it was pretty awful. I incorporated Cacti which partners well with Nagios. Without both tools you don't have a good understanding of how your operation is functioning.

Nagios can be installed on a server with very low specifications, our main server has 512 MB RAM and 1 processor.As the open source version does not provide a configuration interface, for those who need easy administration of Hosts and services - it can be integrated into other web applications such as NagiosQL (Personal favourite) with a database back-end to store configuration in the case of failure.There are many plugins we use on our desktops such as Nagstatus and Nagstatmon which provide us with real time monitoring results instead of sending out E-Mail alerts, Instant messages etc.We currently monitor all our servers using SNMP just to avoid installing apps like NSClient to keep monitoring simple and clean.

The Installation can get very difficult depending on what Linux flavour you are using. The open source version does not provide a configuration web interface. Some scripting knowledge is required in order to make changes to configuration files. Nagios is my favourite open source monitoring system. I just love it! It took me a while to properly configure Nagios to monitor our internal systems. Once we realised its potential we decided to setup remote polling on client systems, to have a central location for monitoring. (Using Centreon)As it is open source we were able to customise everything, from check commands, modifying the web interfaces, integrating into CMDBs such as iTop. When comparing Nagios to other monitoring systems it stands out by far.

If you are new to Nagios I recommend that you watch videos/read documentation before you start to mess around with the code. One little mistake can stop Nagios from monitoring your systems, so make sure that you always backup your configuration!

I mainly use Nagios XI for critical UN, for example, if the CPU usage is very high.

It can be quite difficult to know which drivers and agents to use when setting up.

I've been using Nagios XI for around five years.

Nagios XI is stable.

Nagios XI isn't really good for scaling, in my experience.

The initial setup is very complex, as there's no helpful manual and there are a lot of custom settings you have to learn.

Learning to use Nagios XI is quite time-consuming, so you need patience to get the best out of it. I would rate Nagios XI six out of ten.

On-premises