

Nagios XI and Amazon CloudWatch are two prominent monitoring solutions within the IT monitoring category. Amazon CloudWatch appears to have an advantage with its deep integration with AWS services and comprehensive AWS infrastructure analytics.
Features: Nagios XI provides powerful open-source monitoring with extensive customization through plugins, user-defined scripts, and a flexible infrastructure that supports both simple and complex needs. Amazon CloudWatch offers robust monitoring for AWS services, with capabilities like real-time alerts, seamless AWS environment data aggregation, and advanced analytics to manage cloud infrastructure efficiently.
Room for Improvement: Nagios XI faces challenges with its complex deployment processes due to required advanced scripting for customization and plugins, alongside a less intuitive interface. Amazon CloudWatch's areas for improvement include its user interface and the limitation in monitoring non-AWS systems. It lacks comprehensive log management and report generation compared to specialized third-party tools.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nagios XI typically requires on-premises or hybrid cloud environments for deployment, challenging without scripting skills, but it benefits from a strong open-source community for support. Amazon CloudWatch, as an AWS-built service, is easier to deploy in AWS public cloud with a pay-as-you-go model and scalable support, though potentially costly.
Pricing and ROI: Nagios XI offers both free and paid versions, with the free version being cost-effective for skilled users in custom setups, ensuring immediate ROI from low costs and extensive capabilities. Amazon CloudWatch employs a pay-per-use model suited to AWS environments, affordable for small-scale use but potentially costly as service usage increases significantly.
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost-saving advantages by being an inbuilt solution that requires no separate setup or maintenance for monitoring tasks.
While using their cloud and cloud resources, if you have an issue with CloudWatch, you must pay additional monthly fees to get time from dedicated tech support.
In recent years, due to business expansion, knowledge levels among support engineers seem to vary.
It is already there as a managed service from AWS.
Amazon CloudWatch's scalability is managed by AWS.
If the user interface isn’t presenting data well, it becomes difficult to manage when scaling.
I sometimes notice slowness when Amazon CloudWatch agents are installed on machines with less capacity, causing me to use other monitoring tools.
It is very stable.
When using third-party dashboards such as Kibana or Grafana and other visualization tools, there should be a way to feed CloudWatch's data and logging capabilities into these visualization tools.
Amazon CloudWatch has all the data, but to see what is happening, you need some third-party tool.
Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features.
Many tools have poor user interfaces, making them hard to manage and navigate.
The GUI could be improved. It's a bit too basic.
Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.
Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline.
We are using the free, open-source version.
The pricing for the Nagios XI product is good and better than other solutions.
The basic feature and main use of Amazon CloudWatch is for monitoring.
Being an inbuilt solution from AWS, it saves time on installation, setup, and maintenance.
I like its filtering capability and its ability to give the cyber engine insights.
Nagios XI simplifies our setup and reduces the time spent configuring monitoring tools.
The alerting system is very effective.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Amazon CloudWatch | 2.3% |
| Nagios XI | 3.3% |
| Other | 94.4% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 9 |
| Large Enterprise | 24 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 22 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 17 |
| Large Enterprise | 21 |
Amazon CloudWatch integrates seamlessly with AWS, providing real-time monitoring and alerting features. Its interface supports task automation, enhancing troubleshooting and analytics capabilities, while offering strong security and scalability at a cost-effective rate.
Amazon CloudWatch is an impactful platform for monitoring AWS resources and managing application performance. It simplifies infrastructure performance monitoring by providing comprehensive analytics capabilities, including application insights and event scheduling. Users appreciate CloudWatch for its detailed metrics, dashboards, and support in issuing alerts to detect anomalies. It efficiently tracks performance, optimizes resource utilization, and ensures service availability. CloudWatch is recognized for its robust alerting features and integration with other AWS services, further supporting its resource monitoring capabilities. However, there is room for improvement in dashboard customization, log streaming speed, and integration with non-AWS services. Enhancements in API integration, machine learning features, and support for third-party tools are also desired.
What features does Amazon CloudWatch offer?Industries implementing Amazon CloudWatch often focus on optimizing IT infrastructure. Companies in sectors like finance and e-commerce rely on its monitoring and alerting capabilities to ensure service uptime and performance. The platform's automation and analytics features empower teams to proactively manage performance and detect potential issues promptly.
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:
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.”
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