What needs improvement with Nagios XI?

From an alerting point of view, some graphics and metrics don't work properly with Nagios XI as they do with Checkmk. The solution's scalability, pricing, stability, and support could be improved. Nagios XI should include more AI and cloud capabilities to scale the infrastructure better.

The product's stability could be even better.

The product does not have SAP monitoring. When I was using the solution, it did not have a dashboard. We had to manually connect to the database, collect information and create the visuals.

Nagios XI can improve network and hardware monitoring, these parameters should be simplified to allow usage for monitoring. Additionally, if there was automatic reporting it would be helpful.

Technical support is an area that needs improvement. It is not available 24/7. Having some additional features added would be beneficial.

Nagios XI doesn't provide scripting. For example, if we have built up multiple IPX tunnels from a base location to a data center location and want to monitor or trigger an alert if the tunnel goes down, Nagios XI does not automatically send alerts notifying us that the tunnel is down. This is a feature we want, and in the past, Nagios completed scripting for us, but it didn't work out well. In addition, Nagios XI doesn't have a feature where we can push the configuration from the server to all our devices. For example, if there are 500 devices in our network and we need to write down a simple command like a show clock or want to write the configuration, we cannot execute this command on all of our devices. We have already raised this issue with Nagios, and they told us they would speak with the BU team to see if this can be applied in the next release. If they do, it will come with an additional license. Another feature we want is the IP SLA Tracking in Cisco. For example, if our ISP connection is traversing through an L2 point, which is a layer two point, we don't have IP-to-IP communication to track those interfaces. So if we need to implement something end-to-end and the interface goes down, we should get alerts for that. And if the interface goes down, there should be specific behaviour so that our traffic can switch over from the LAN or the WAN. That is not in the current Nagios deployment, but they have advised they are working on it.

As it is open-source, it is not user-friendly. Open-source software is usually not user-friendly.

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.

For some, it may be difficult to deploy. The process could be simplified. We'd like to see more integration capabilities. There's a bit of complexity in the product in general. It could be simplified overall.

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

I would like them to have better public cloud discovery. I would like to be able to extend it to all of our data centers, whether they are in the cloud or not. It would be helpful if I could connect everywhere.

The way Nagios displays information isn't easy for a new user to understand. It's not intuitive enough. You need to read some tutorials or be trained to understand what it's displaying. Also, I think it needs more features to improve network visibility because there are some things you can't detect.

An area for improvement would be that when we need any modifications for the configurations, we need to delete the host and configure through CPM. It would be great if they could add a feature so that the existing host can be modified through XI. In the next release, I'd like them to add an option to modify the results when configuring through results.

I would like to see Nagios integrate the team mail with the SMS gateway so we can send text alerts. It's difficult to use. To activate this option, you have to activate something from another script then use a shell script to integrate via another gateway SMS. Also, it would be great if it were integrated with another solution to generate logs, like PCM, AlienVault, or Splunk. We want alerts integrated with a system to generate logs. AlienVault and Splunk could enable this option. It is really difficult to integrate Nagios XI with another system to generate logs and alert our management of failures in security infrastructure.

The pricing has recently risen. I know they've changed what is covered under the license, however, it doesn't change the way we use it and adds nothing to our experience, and yet we now have to pay more. An optional delivery from their end in order to greatly produce some sort of a HA, high availability solution, would be ideal. At present, if I have a solution and Nagios is instanced in a particular data center and another Nagios solution in another data center, when you buy the license, you can eventually have different types of licenses. One will be a stand-by and the other will be a disaster recovery solution. What's missing from the Nagios side is the idea of having some sort of synchronization between the two instances. If I have a stand-by solution and I need ticketing as an active solution, I need to do many things manually. For example, I need to manually do ticketing on the backup and restore it on the other. It would be a good idea for some sort of mechanism, like a sort of clustering, which can help a lot for people out there who need something in an active-standby solution. I'm not sure this will be available out there even on other solutions, like Zabbix, for example, That said, I don't think they're really digging into this kind of scenario. When you start deploying thousands of monitors, especially in a big company, for example, you have to take care, as that you cannot keep on pushing into one solution. It can become inefficient. They say it's specifically that when you skip an X amount of monitors, Nagios starts behaving differently. I really don't like the idea of the certification provided by them. As a company and as a team lead, I have other people who were interested in doing some certifications, coming from the management. However, they did not provide any sort of training, which gives you the independence to do an exam. It's like they just provide a simple document for you to read and then just to apply in the exam, just to be Nagios certified. On top of that, that kind of document is very old. I asked them if they had anything up-to-date. They told me that's what they have even though it's clear it's very old quality for the current engine that Nagios is currently built on. There were quite a number of upgrades - at least five. At the same time, Zabbix certification offers you training beforehand and then you can opt for either a certification or an exam.

1. Reporting items needs more improvement and need to be more flexible based on customer needs 2. Clustering feature need to be implemented for large environment. Some solutions introduced in official website such as Mod-Gearman and Nagios Fusion but the first one implemented by third party and second one is not include management control and just a central view from several instances. I think Nagios should implement an official solution for clustering for enterprise and large scales that should be included database solution as well.

We often need to develop custom plugins to get Nagios to work the way we want it to work because the features we need are not always available in Nagios. Some products such as Zabbix have a software monitoring system built-in, such as the Prometheus monitoring system. It can use the features to monitor cloud systems. This would be a useful feature to include in Nagios XI. Nagios has some plugins to monitor clouding systems, but this feature on Zabbix is so handy and so user-friendly. I think it can be added to the Nagios monitoring system.

For enterprise users, the product would be better if it came with dedicated plugins. It has an online store for plugins and additional features, but most of the plugins we have are mostly open source. These open source plugins do not have a lot of documentation. We have to try to figure out how to use them on our own. They have good documentation for their own products and because of that, we have details to easily use their product as they have a guide. There is no documentation on the plugin site. They need more documentation for the plugins. Besides that, there's nothing more that I would add as the product covers my current needs. Maybe I would like a lower price. That is maybe a problem they could fix.

There's room for improvement in the visibility, and in the ability to extract information. Stuff like this should be more simple. Going over the data and the information is complicated at the moment. The management of the commands is also a little complicated.

I would like to see more customization in the network map because it is a bit tricky to use it. First, when you click on one of the devices on the map, it shows you information about the equipment. Sometimes, there is information that I do not want to show. I would instead like to choose what is shown. Next, I would like to have the ability to show only a subset of equipment on the network map. When you view it, all of the equipment that you have is there, every time. Sometimes, I would like to choose just a group of devices to view.

This solution would be improved with the inclusion of additional services. Monitoring streaming services is an example of something that is not currently supported, so in order to handle this, I would have to write a script. Scripts like this should be included in the next version of the solution. I would like to see support for notification via SMS.

When you monitor a lot of things it creates a lot of events and logs. I would like a much easier GUI so that I can delete events and logs, which will free up a lot of space. I would also like a better GUI for dashboard viewing. A better interface would allow this solution to be used as a single point of monitoring. When the database is in need of repair, perhaps due to corruption caused by an improper shutdown, then it should happen automatically, rather than having to run a command.

I think that the process of installing this solution can be improved because it is quite hectic. The interface could be more user-friendly.

* Developing a tool for KPIs and KQIs * WebUI should be improved (visual aspect) and should incorporate non-relational databases.