Amazon CloudWatch vs Nagios XI comparison

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) Logo
4,580 views|3,689 comparisons
88% willing to recommend
Nagios Logo
7,152 views|5,443 comparisons
86% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Aug 11, 2023

We compared Amazon CloudWatch and Nagios XI based on our users' reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.

  • Features: Amazon CloudWatch users liked the solution’s simplicity, intuitive interface, and ability to handle large workloads. Users also praised CloudWatch’s comprehensive monitoring and alerts. Nagios XI received positive feedback for its versatility and adaptability. It offers a diverse selection of plugins and scripts for monitoring needs.

  • Room for improvement: Some reviews mentioned that Amazon CloudWatch could improve performance and dashboard visualization. Others noted that the solution lacked compatibility with some databases. Users have suggested Nagios XI could improve integration, simplify configuration, and make the platform more user-friendly. Nagios XI users also suggest improvements to network visibility and cloud discovery. 

  • Service and Support: Customers generally have positive opinions about Amazon's customer service. They commended the support team for its availability and timely issue resolution. Some Nagios XI customers complained about the lack of chat or phone support options.

  • Ease of Deployment: Amazon CloudWatch is generally described as easy to set up. Some Nagios XI users found the setup to be relatively simple, while others considered it challenging. Deployment can take a few months to complete, and there’s a steep learning curve.

  • Pricing: Amazon CloudWatch offers a flexible pricing structure based on usage and processing, without any separate licensing cost. Some users said that scaling up can be costly due to the need for additional storage space. Nagios XI’s pricing is considered reasonable and transparent, with no extra charges.

  • ROI: Amazon CloudWatch offers a return on investment by minimizing the need for manual monitoring. Nagios XI users reported positive outcomes overall, but some said visibility limitations lower the solution’s ROI.

Comparison Results: Reviewers say that Amazon CloudWatch is a simple, intuitive solution that can handle large workloads, but some mentioned dashboard visualization and customizability as areas for improvement. Nagios XI is an affordable, flexible solution with a broad feature set and a selection of helpful plugins. At the same time, users say the setup can be complex, and some expressed a desire for more convenient ways to contact support.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon CloudWatch vs. Nagios XI Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,415 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The solution gives us very good real-time data.""The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda.""I can put it in a simple term, its simplicity is always there.""The product helps us collect and store various metrics to set test alarms.""The solution is easy to use.""It is a stable solution...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.""You can enable alarms and metrics, and it has robust integration with AWS services. You can also trigger events. For example, if the CPU utilization is above 80%, it can launch a new instance for you.""It offers direct integrations with various storage providers, making it convenient to push logs from CloudWatch to these external platforms."

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"The solution has a lot of plugins and scripts integrated with it.""It's great for monitoring IT services infrastructure.""The most valuable feature is the dashboard, where I can have a single screen that provides a summary for hundreds of servers.""BPI: It allows defining peripherals to map business criticality for efficient monitoring, as required.""Nagios allows us to configure any device so that we can send pager alerts when people don't have access to emails. It also allows us to schedule downtime and maintenance.""An excellent solution that is easy and intuitive to implement.""The most valuable feature is the monitoring of processes.""The most valuable feature is its support for different types of devices, where it can use all of the equipment that you need."

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Cons
"When customers want to see the CPU or memory utilization there is a cost. This should be free to see the utilization.""The solution's pricing is a bit higher.""The solution's integration could be easier for laypersons.""The technical support must be improved.""Improvement of SSSD logs would be beneficial.""This product lacks some features: real-time data stream monitoring, application performance monitoring, mobile app monitoring, and live dashboards. Its workflows also need improvement.""The dashboard of Amazon CloudWatch is not very customizable right now.""I would like to monitor inbound and outbound transfer. I would also like to control the traffic for load balancing."

More Amazon CloudWatch Cons →

"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.""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.""They need more documentation for the plugins.""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 product's stability could be even better.""I would like a much easier GUI so that I can delete events and logs, which will free up a lot of space.""The reporting structure could be more streamlined.""The interface could be more user-friendly."

More Nagios XI Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We have monthly licensing costs. The licenses are probably in the vicinity of about $300 - $350/month."
  • "Its pricing is reasonable. It is sometimes tricky, but it is reasonable as compared to others."
  • "What's were using is the free service of Amazon CloudWatch, so they're not charging us. As for hidden fees, we're not aware of them because we're using what our clients provided us."
  • "The pricing model is pay-as-you-go so you have to be mindful of usage to manage costs."
  • "Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable."
  • "The solution is expensive."
  • "The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable for detailed basic monitoring."
  • "The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable. When the rate of data collection is done the price will increase. The price is less than other solutions."
  • More Amazon CloudWatch Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The pricing is really cost efficient. The licensing is perpetual and can be renewed very easily."
  • "You can grow into the higher-priced scale as they learn how to utilize the features for Nagios XI."
  • "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."
  • "We are using the free version of this solution."
  • "This solution is very expensive, at approximately $5,000 USD when I purchased it, which is why I haven't upgraded my version in several years."
  • "The licensing fees for this solution are approximately $3,000 USD per year."
  • "The pricing is high with separate licensing for the product and support."
  • "Nagios Core does not have any payment, but Nagios XI requires payment for the license."
  • More Nagios XI Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want using these, but they require quite some expertise before you can use them. Then there are the ones that are not open source, the enterprise softwares and cost you some money, but on the other hand, they are extremely easy to set-up and learn. You can have them up and running in a matter of minutes. And then there are those which are completely cloud based. They can be free of cost or charge some money depending on the software. The good thing about these is that you don’t have to install any extra software, and it can be managed completely online but then again these have limited features and you cannot exploit them to the full extent as you can do with the open-source and to some extent the enterprise software, so I won’t suggest you to use these, because these are generally not the complete solutions and require other support software to achieve the same. Below I have listed the outstanding pros and cons of the various Network analyzers that you can look into Nagios Pros: Nagios offers an extensive set of collector plug-ins that allows users to gather performance and availability data from a broad range of operating systems, including  Windows and Netware Nagios… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The monitoring features are valuable.
    Top Answer:CloudWatch doesn’t monitor disk throughput by default. It is part of EC2. If EC2 forwards the logs, then we can do it.
    Top Answer:It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability.
    Top Answer:I don't deal with the licensing aspect of the product.
    Top Answer:The product's stability could be even better.
    Ranking
    Views
    4,580
    Comparisons
    3,689
    Reviews
    34
    Average Words per Review
    433
    Rating
    8.2
    10th
    Views
    7,152
    Comparisons
    5,443
    Reviews
    9
    Average Words per Review
    343
    Rating
    8.3
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows users to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms. With CloudWatch, users can gain insights into their applications, infrastructure, and services, enabling them to make informed decisions and take necessary actions. 

    It provides a unified view of AWS resources and applications, making it easier to troubleshoot issues and optimize performance. CloudWatch offers a range of features including customizable dashboards, automated actions, and integration with other AWS services. 

    The product is a scalable and reliable solution that helps businesses ensure the availability and performance of their applications and infrastructure.

    Nagios XI provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components, including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Third-party add-ons provide tools for monitoring virtually all in-house and external applications, services, and systems.

    Nagios XI uses a powerful Core 4 monitoring engine that provides users with the highest levels of server monitoring performance. This high degree of performance enables nearly limitless scalability and monitoring powers.

    With Nagios XI, stakeholders can check up on their infrastructure status using the role-based web interface. Sophisticated dashboards enable access to monitoring information and third-party data. Administrators can easily set up permissions so users can only access the infrastructure they are authorized to view.

    Nagios XI Benefits and Features

    Some of the benefits and top features of using Nagios XI include:

    • Extensive IT infrastructure monitoring: Comprehensively monitor all of your organization’s infrastructure’s components. Hundreds of third-party add-ons let you monitor virtually any internal application, service, or system.

    • Proactivity: With built-in, automated trend analysis and capacity planning charts, organizations can plan infrastructure upgrades before legacy systems encounter unexpected issues. IT staff, business stakeholders, and end users are notified via email or SMS with details of the outage so they can begin handling the issue immediately.

    • Multiple integration options: Numerous available APIs allow seamless integration with in-house and third-party applications. Thousands of community-developed add-ons that extend monitoring and native alerting capabilities as well as custom interfaces are available, allowing you to customize Nagios XI to your company's needs.

    • Complete visibility: Get a single view of your entire IT operations network and business processes. The Nagios XI dashboards provide at-a-glance access to monitoring information and third-party data. Views give users quick access to the most useful information.

    • User-friendly interface: Customize the layout, design, and settings for each user’s GUI, providing clients and team members with the flexibility they need. Administrators can easily delegate control over monitoring configuration management, system settings, and more to end users and team members using the built-in web-based configuration interface. A configuration wizard guides users through the process of monitoring new devices, services, and applications without understanding complex monitoring concepts.

    • Configuration snapshots: Snapshots allow you to save and archive your most recent configurations. Later on, you can revert back to them whenever you like.

    • Advanced user management: Ensure a secure infrastructure environment by easily setting up and managing user accounts and assigning custom roles with just a few mouse clicks.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Nagios XI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its integration options and monitoring abilities, as well as its alerting features.

    David P., a senior DevOps engineer at EML Payments Ltd, writes, “We use Nagios as a network discovery tool. We use Nagios to maintain our uptime statistics and to monitor our services. It has allowed us to be much more sophisticated in our monitoring and alerting.”

    An IT-OSS manager at a comms service provider notes, “Nagios XI has a custom API feature, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature.”

    Sample Customers
    AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
    Nagios has over one million users globally, including AOL, DHL, McAfee, MCI, MTV, Yahoo!, Universal, Toshiba, Sony, Siemens, and JPMorgan Chase.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm31%
    Healthcare Company13%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Government6%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider32%
    Manufacturing Company24%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Retailer8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization49%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Financial Services Firm5%
    Government5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business35%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise64%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise34%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise54%
    Large Enterprise34%
    Buyer's Guide
    Amazon CloudWatch vs. Nagios XI
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Nagios XI and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,415 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 9th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 40 reviews while Nagios XI is ranked 10th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 54 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 8.0, while Nagios XI is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Amazon CloudWatch writes "Instantaneous response when monitoring logs and KPIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nagios XI writes "Great for monitoring IT services infrastructure with nice tools and helpful notifications". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Zabbix, Datadog, Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), Dynatrace and Instana Infrastructure Monitoring, whereas Nagios XI is most compared with Zabbix, Nagios Core, PRTG Network Monitor, Icinga and Wireshark. See our Amazon CloudWatch vs. Nagios XI report.

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    We monitor all Cloud Monitoring Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.