Nagios XI and Kentik are both competitors in the network monitoring and analysis category. Nagios XI holds an advantage in cost-effectiveness due to its open-source flexibility and comprehensive service monitoring. In contrast, Kentik shines in traffic analysis and flow detection thanks to its robust NetFlow visualization.
Features: Nagios XI is characterized by its configurable and scalable monitoring capabilities enhanced through customizable plugins. It supports a diverse range of network services and allows users to write their own scripts due to its open-source architecture. Kentik provides robust traffic insights, aiding in network planning, security, and real-time troubleshooting. Its SaaS model reduces management complexity, eliminating the need for additional server oversight. Both are well-suited to different application types in network monitoring.
Room for Improvement: Nagios XI faces scaling challenges and requires scripting knowledge for advanced configurations. It lacks a failover feature and needs better clustering solutions. Kentik's pricing model and API complexity are pain points, with recommendations for enhanced user-friendliness and actionable insights in flow analysis. Integrating better with performance tools is another improvement area for Kentik.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nagios XI offers a variety of deployment options, including on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, with support from an open-source community though initial setup may be intricate. Customer support experiences are mixed, with responsiveness being a concern. Kentik supports private and on-premises cloud deployments, and its customer support is responsive, albeit with time zone challenges.
Pricing and ROI: Nagios XI, especially in its open-source iteration, is cost-effective and offers immediate ROI due to low upfront costs. Licensing is competitive, although some view it as expensive compared to its open-source version. Kentik, priced by devices and data flow, is considered expensive but scales effectively with large volumes. Discounts are offered to educational institutions, and both solutions provide ROI through time savings.
In production environments, especially for service providers on IP networks and data centers, Kentik helps in reducing the time to identify and resolve issues.
They have monthly calls and discuss the product roadmap with us to determine what is needed.
I have mostly used forums for any support needed because the setup is straightforward and the documentation is quite good.
Kentik's integration with Kubernetes makes scaling easier.
You can scale as many devices and tests as you want, but you should have a good number of credits in your accounts.
If the user interface isn’t presenting data well, it becomes difficult to manage when scaling.
Based on stability, I would give Kentik a nine.
In production, however, dimensioning of the underlying platforms is something to be mindful of.
It is very stable.
More work is required to integrate AI for troubleshooting, simplifying root cause analysis, and providing suggested solutions for network issues.
Many tools have poor user interfaces, making them hard to manage and navigate.
The GUI could be improved. It's a bit too basic.
Kentik’s pricing is competitive in the marketplace.
The pricing is good and aligns with the market target.
We are using the free, open-source version.
The pricing for the Nagios XI product is good and better than other solutions.
Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives.
One of the most valuable features of Kentik, especially for service providers, is its ability to visualize all the BGP peering and the status of the BGP peering platform.
Kentik is easy to use and set up.
Nagios XI simplifies our setup and reduces the time spent configuring monitoring tools.
The alerting system is very effective.
Kentik's AIOps Network Traffic Intelligence platform unifies network operations, performance, security, and business intelligence.
With a purpose-built big data engine delivered as public or private SaaS, Kentik captures a high-resolution view of actual network traffic data and enriches it with critical application and business data, so every network event or analysis can be tied to revenue & costs, customer & user experience, performance & risk.
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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