Nagios Core vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

Nagios and VMware are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. Nagios is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.2, while VMware is ranked #40 with an average rating of 8.8. Nagios holds a 3.6% mindshare in IM, compared to VMware’s 0.4% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Nagios users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Nagios Core

Read 51 Nagios Core reviews

4,123 Views
1,260 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

vRealize Network Insight

Read 46 vRealize Network Insight reviews

793 Views
113 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Nagios Core

vRealize Network Insight

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

vRealize Network Insight and Nagios Core are network monitoring solutions competing in the network management category. vRealize Network Insight is favored for its comprehensive features, while Nagios Core remains popular due to its open-source nature.

Features: vRealize Network Insight offers advanced network visualization, micro-segmentation capabilities, and exhaustive troubleshooting features. It supports real-time monitoring and provides user-friendly dashboards with natural language query capabilities. Nagios Core is valued for its flexibility and extensibility, allowing customization through a wide array of monitoring plugins.

Room for Improvement: vRealize Network Insight could improve integration with third-party products, application identification, and reporting capabilities. Nagios Core faces challenges with its complex setup process, cumbersome user interface, and basic reporting tools, necessitating an easier configuration and more intuitive graphical displays.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: vRealize Network Insight is mainly deployed on-premises and is known for responsive technical support with knowledgeable staff. Nagios Core, also predominantly deployed on-premises, offers community-based support, suitable for users with robust technical expertise due to its extensive customization requirements.

Pricing and ROI: vRealize Network Insight is considered expensive, yet supports labor savings and efficient network management, providing ROI by reducing time and increasing network performance. Nagios Core, being free, avoids licensing costs but requires customization investments. Its open-source nature is cost-effective for tech-savvy users seeking to minimize expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed Nagios Core vs. vRealize Network Insight Report (Updated: May 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core vs. vRealize Network Insight

May 2025

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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

13th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

10th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

vRealize Network Insight

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

35th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

40th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Nagios Core is 3.6%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.4%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Nishith-Vyas

Tech Lead at STL Digital Limited

Valuable reporting and alert system with room for PDF export improvements

The NetEase reporting structure needs improvement, especially the availability report, which is weak. It should be generated automatically with minimal human intervention and should be exportable as a PDF. Besides that, an integrated PDF export feature for reports is necessary. Also, the alert mechanism and graphing mechanism need to be integrated properly into Nagios Core. Currently, integrating these requires advanced Linux knowledge. Integration of more visualization tools like Grafana and Prometheus for better graphing and visualization is also recommended.

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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

The tool's configuration is easy and artifacts are easily accessible through professional services and the web

The product is highly regarded, and many customers have been using it along with other VMware products like vSphere and VMware vCloud Usage Insight. However, recently, there's been a trend among customers, especially those using VMware for a considerable period, to explore the potential of migrating to the public cloud. The common concern among these customers is how the VMware products will perform in the public cloud environment. Migrating instances from VMware to different platforms is not easy, especially when dealing with many instances across multiple customers. Customers are keen to maintain the functionality of their existing VMware products but prefer to run them on the public cloud instead of on-premise servers. Our clients for vRealize Network Insight are enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The notifications are definitely one of the most valuable features of Nagios Core. We know what to look for and what to expect when things are down."

"Alert calls occur anytime a service goes down or a matrix is difficult and that helps us to quickly restore service and transfer work."

"Our customers like that Nagios Core is an open source solution. It can be customized to our customers' specific needs."

"The solution is quite efficient."

"What I like about Nagios Core is that it helps me ensure everything is running smoothly by checking the status of hosts and services."

"Provides timely notifications."

"The reporting structure and the feature set are valuable to me."

"Nagios Core is stable."

More Nagios Core pros

"What's valuable to us is the ability to get a view into the virtual space, which is something we haven't had before. Before, it was done by collecting from network endpoints and extrapolating into the virtual environment. Now it's coming directly from the virtual environment."

"The most valuable feature for me is the different views that you can get when selecting an application or a VLAN. It shows you the traffic flows. It gives you a visual representation of something that, in text, just may not make as much sense."

"As a troubleshooting tool, it's a level-3 troubleshooting-skills tool and it's very easy to use and very easy to find the information that you need."

"Whenever we say "valuable" with respect to the network, it's more towards the security. The firewall rule issues it shows us and the recommendations that we get from vRNI are the most valuable features because they are actually making our network more secure."

"I find that the interface of most VMware products is very similar, which I consider an advantage due to its ease of use compared to other tools like Splunk."

"We're a smaller company so it automates a lot of the tasks and lets us focus in on building out our own solution. It's quicker, there is less building of manual solutions, and less downtime. It allows our developers to quickly develop, get provisioning done, de-provisioning, etc; the stuff that you would expect to be able to make it streamlined."

"It is user-friendly. It's pretty simple to deploy and to run. It gives you pretty easy-to-understand reports, very graphically intense, so you can visualize what's going on in your network."

"The solution is extremely intuitive and user-friendly. When you log in to the application you are presented with a dashboard that is very reasonable for an initial user, and you can then customize it to your specific needs. But for all the data that we've found, we've only had to go through two or three drill-downs to get into that information."

More vRealize Network Insight pros

Cons

"Would benefit from aggregations if a particular server goes down."

"The interface could be improved."

"I would like to see a sensor that shows the traffic of a user and what they're doing on the network."

"The tool needs to improve the integrations."

"The user interface could be more interactive because it is pretty basic."

"t was a little hard to get our setup represented in the configuration."

"The NetEase reporting structure needs improvement, especially the availability report, which is weak."

"The scalability needs improvement, it's not scalable at this time."

More Nagios Core cons

"There's enough information there, especially in the visualizations, but I would love to see this in a kiosk mode, where I could have a dashboard for interested stakeholders to see and appreciate what's going on. Then, moving on to a more practical level for our Help Desk, our operations team could benefit by seeing, in real-time, a visual view of the network."

"The IT infrastructure industry is expected to evolve towards a hybrid cloud model in the next five to ten years. In this model, most of the customer's resources reside on-premise within a private cloud setup, such as VMware. Another segment operates within public cloud environments like Azure and AWS, and a portion remains in traditional data centers. There should be seamless interoperability between public and private clouds. AWS and VMware need to work together to make it possible. Whether users interact with on-premise infrastructure or configure resources in the public cloud, the user experience must be seamless."

"After Broadcom acquired VMware, I would rate their support at five or less in many cases. It's difficult to find necessary documentation, open tickets, and get support."

"There is room for improvement when it comes to pricing because we pay here in Brazil, and all the costs are based on the dollar."

"I would like to see application identification. That would be cool."

"The only real improvement they can make is to add more third-party vendors into the environment, mostly switch manufacturers, because it's really limited to Cisco equipment and there are a lot of companies out there other than Cisco."

"vRNI needs more remediation where it hooks into NSX."

"The virtual appliance has rebooted."

More vRealize Network Insight cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the open-source, unpaid version."

"The product is cheaply priced."

"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."

"We are using the free version of Nagios Core."

"Nagios Core is an open source solution, and there are no licensing fees."

"It's free."

"Nagios Core is a cheap solution."

More Nagios Core pricing and cost advice

"It's a little expensive, but for what you're getting out of the product, you often see the trade-off. It depends on the type of licensing you have. It might be a little too pricey for some."

"They should include the product in NSX because it's important to have it for deployment."

"Cost always has room for improvement, you could always make it cheaper. But I think it's a good value for what you pay for it."

"We have spent less time investigating network flows, so it is absolutely cost-effective."

"It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly."

"I rate vRealize Network Insight's pricing a seven point five out of ten."

"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."

"It's an expensive product because we have a lot of nodes."

More vRealize Network Insight pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Nagios Core?

What I like about Nagios Core is that it helps me ensure everything is running smoothly by checking the status of hosts and services.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about vRealize Network Insight?

The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?

Broadcom is known for increasing product prices, making them expensive compared to what people used to pay. I liken the subscription model to not truly owning what you pay for.

See all answers

What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?

Right now, I do not see a specific area for improvement. My main concern is understanding the intentions of Broadcom, which has acquired VMware. Broadcom should improve by going back to what was wo...

See all answers

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core

June 2025

Download Nagios Core product report

Buyer's Guide

vRealize Network Insight

June 2025

Download vRealize Network Insight product report

Also Known As

No data available

Arkin

Overview

This is IT infrastructure monitoring's industry-standard, open-source core. Free without professional support services.

Nagios

VMware vRealize Network Insight delivers intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security. It helps customers build an optimized, highly-available and secure network infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. It accelerates micro-segmentation planning and deployment, enables visibility across virtual and physical networks and provides operational views to manage and scale VMware NSX deployments.

VMware

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel

NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core vs. vRealize Network Insight

May 2025

Free Report: Nagios Core vs. vRealize Network Insight

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