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Nagios Core vs Viavi Observer Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Nagios Core
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (10th)
Viavi Observer Platform
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
94th
Average Rating
0.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Nagios Core is 1.7%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Viavi Observer Platform is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nagios Core1.7%
Viavi Observer Platform0.3%
Other98.0%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

HY
Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group
Monitoring solution provides comprehensive visibility across IT infrastructure
The good thing about Nagios Core is it covers everything. Everything in the IT domain, you can monitor anything. You can even monitor printers, the ports of printers, Core workstations, and storage. You can monitor the workflow Core and the utilization of computes. If you want to grasp everything of your IT equipment on a single interface, you can use Nagios. It's the best one. It provides dashboards, and you can also configure your emails and alerts with it. If something is critical, you can configure it to notify via emails. It has a very handy dashboard, providing live alerts and visibility for everything.
JeroenDubbelman - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Bitrate
The product is extremely valuable and provides a lot of functionalities and visibility to organizations
The score-based application performance ratings help the network team. Often, customers have a siloed environment for security, applications, and servers. The network team is always asked to do troubleshooting. Being able to know how well an application worked in the past and what's happening today is really helpful. If someone has a complaint and the network team says that the problem is not on their side, they must be able to demonstrate it accurately. The network team is often given the least budget and the least number of employees. So, they must be able to troubleshoot and pinpoint problems as fast as possible. If it’s a network issue, they must fix it. However, if it is a cloud problem, an ISP problem, or a problem within the server or application environment, they must be able to demonstrate it clearly. It is the real benefit they get from the solution. Some of our customers are financial institutions. They use the tool for traffic accounting, especially when they get charged by ISPs or carriers for the amount of traffic they are using. In South Africa, we have banks that pay the service providers to allow customers to use their banking apps for free. The bank pays for it, not the customers. So, they need to compare to ensure they are paying for what has been used. Viavi enables them to do that. It is pretty much the best there is in the world. There is nothing to beat it. The product is extremely valuable and provides a lot of functionalities. It's really impressive.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature depends on the project; it's great if you need to check to ensure a service is running 24/7, I can use the full solution for free, and it's flexible."
"The features of Nagios Core that we find most valuable are the plugins we use, we can check the uptime and see how many servers and routers and create groups accordingly."
"This product covers all of our infrastructure health checks, and has triggers for us to alert us to any unusual behaviour of the monitored systems."
"Dashboard provides monitor of total assets."
"The solution is quite efficient."
"I like that it's very simple to install, easy to manage and deploy, and easy to use for monitoring."
"We mostly use Nagios Core to integrate with Python and Bash Script."
"I like the way the solution sends alerts and how it keeps on escalating them."
"The score-based application performance ratings help the network team."
 

Cons

"A better UI for graphing would make it better. The present graphs are not very friendly and good to see."
"The mapping is a little hard."
"This solution is not scalable at all. If you want to add an AI, or if you wanted to monitor different types of metrics, you won't get the most out of it."
"Nagios Core can improve the graphical interface, it would make things a little easier."
"Setup is bit complicated due to the large set of libraries it needs, but this may be because it's open source."
"I believe Nagios Core will need to provide an option for big data platforms in the future."
"It is a bit slow due to latency."
"When compared to earlier versions, it looks like 4.x has lost the statusmap.cgi module."
"The product must start using a bit more machine learning and AI, especially for security."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have saved a lot of time, money, and effort in reducing disaster times, which is owed to Nagios quick alerting."
"I would rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."
"Nagios Core is a cheap solution."
"We are using the free version of Nagios Core."
"The Nagios Core (PNP4Nagios + Core) is free and can be setup by Netadmin within a few hours. The only additional cost is the cloud server."
"It's free."
"Nagios Core is free to use."
"The product is cheaply priced."
"The tool is very pricey."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise23
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nagios Core?
Nagios Core is a free and open-source product. We don't charge for the product itself, but we charge for the man-hour costs related to installation, configuration, ongoing operation, and maintenance.
What needs improvement with Nagios Core?
The dashboard should be improved. It's very simple. I don't have a very clear or specific suggestion. You can change the skin of the dashboard, however, it's good for me.
What is your primary use case for Nagios Core?
I was a senior system administrator. I've been using Nagios Core for more than ten years now. It can be used to monitor hosts, such as machines, and monitor services of any kind. I'm using it to mo...
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Auvik, Datadog and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: March 2026.
886,077 professionals have used our research since 2012.