Nagios Core Reviews

Gathering data from various machines easily without worrying about the underlying OS or technology.

We can get real time statistics of our servers which improves our monitoring. The integration of Nagios with other tools makes our monitoring way better than what we previously had in place.

It would be nice if it was hosted in cloud. Also, they need to improve the graphs.

I've been using it for four years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I haven't had the need to use technical support.

This is our first infrastructure monitoring tool.

It was straightforward.

We did it in-house. There is no extra effort needed if you just go through the regular installation instructions.

We are using the free version.

You should go ahead and try it.

The first most valuable feature are the notifications that can be customized and even received via WhatsApp.

Another valuable feature is the reporting. As far as I know, there's no way to cheat on the reporting, that is, there's no way to go into the system to change the results. This makes the reporting feature very reliable. The reports are also very easy to understand, which is good when I present them to my boss.

Lastly, Nagios is not a resource hog. I can set it up on a busy server and it will still function reliably. This allows sysadmins to keep server maintenance costs low.

I can give an example. It was during a seasonal festival and visitors to our e-commerce site increase several-fold. The log partition quickly filled up within two days. If it wasn't for Nagios' alerts every minute until we acknowledged the problem, our website would have stopped working. (I can't remember why the logrotate didn't work, though.)

I like to have the option to configure Nagios using the web interface. Although I agree that the CLI gives a lot of customization options, I'd like to take a break from looking at lines of words. Also, configuration via a web interface could be expanded to not-so-Linux-literate users.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

I did encounter stability issues when exploring plugins, but not with Nagios itself. Other than that, I never faced any issues on the production side.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

Since Nagios is open source, I had to rely completely on forums and web articles. However, Nagios was set up before I joined the company, so my colleagues were able to give me ample support when trying to understand how it works.

I never used a different solution because this current position is my first. Nagios was already set up before I joined the company. Nagios was already good enough for us so we didn't allocate time to research other products.

The initial setup is easy if you just follow the basic guide. The complexity comes when you want to customize it to suit your environment. For example, different plugins require different configurations. There's also another challenge in that Nagios was originally designed to monitor Linux servers but has since expanded to Windows servers as well.

It was all done by us. We were given time to do our own research and through regular testing, trials and errors, we finally implemented it. My advice is to not be scared by the need to configure everything through the CLI. It's actually quite fun and rewarding when you see your monitoring system finally up and you know you can count on it to give you a heads up on alerts before something nasty happens to your server.

Nagios is able to minimize server downtime and this in turn helps to generate more revenue.

Nagios is open sourced, therefore there's no need for licensing.

The product is robust and reliable. The notifications can be customized so that I can even configure it to send the notifications via WhatsApp! Last but not least, the reporting feature is very easy to understand, which is good when presenting to my boss.

Extensibility is good as this makes it easy to write checks on your own. Also, it's light as since v4 it isn't resource heavy.

No IT company would survive without a monitoring system. Nagios helped the companies I've worked with to achieve an acceptable level of monitoring.

Nagios was not built with scalability in mind. It does not work in a distributed fashion, and fixing this issue would probably require rewriting a big chunk of its code. There are other solutions, born as a fork of Nagios, that do this but it would be great if Nagios could do it.

I've been using it for five years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It does not scale horizontally. We had to wrote our own web interface and puppetry to manage/view all the hosts managed by various, indipendent Nagios hosts.

It's very easy to install Nagios as its package is provided by many Linux distributions and there are plenty of documentation online.

Don't use it. If Nagios is what you already have, you can try keep using it. If you're starting from scratch, there are products that scale better and perform better, and they use the same plugin syntax as they were initially Nagios forks.

The Auto Inventory is valuable.

Automatic monitoring of any new server added to the organization.

A better UI for graphing would make it better. The present graphs are not very friendly and good to see. 

I've been using it for two years.

I needed to add a tweak to make the monitoring work. 

There have been no issues with the stability.

We have had no scaling issues.

It was a little complex.

I implemented it all by myself. 

Its free. I have not used the Enterprise version. 

I evaluated Zabbix, but found Nagios better for my needs due to its simplicity and one dashboard for all servers.

Its an awesome product to use. 100% recommended for all organizations.

• Monitoring the critical services and network environment for a large multi-site company. 
• It is also used for troubleshooting issues and capacity planning.

Nagios allows IT staff and end-users to see the status of critical services on the network. It also can alert and notify selected users if critical services fail, reducing the mean time to recover.

Availability of additional plugins like SNMP for instant alerts and PNP4Nagios for graphs make this a powerful solution.

This is the open source product, so it's a toolkit rather than a complete solution. See Nagios XI for a more complete version. 

Alerting and proactive monitoring are invaluable. It also allows you to write your own plugin if you have no alternatives and you need to have things under control.

It sends alerts to the right people which ensures there is no delay in the correct person or team looking into issues. It's helped to reduce downtime in the production environment to almost zero. Due to this, we now spend less time on network or server administration.

Sometimes we have had downtimes because of stupid problems such as a service suddenly stopping without any reason, or a SQL server datababase or logs growing too big, and too fast, network devices failure etc. With Nagios, this has been reduced.

The configuration and reporting modules need to be improved. I'd like to have them include a basic install package, and if you don't like the packages included, have the ability to can replace them with different ones from the Nagios plug-in site.

I've been using it for six years, and we're currently planning to upgrade it.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

I'm running Nagios with CentOS 5 on one server with no problems. I'm going to update the server because of plugin requirements.

I've not had to scale it.

This was our first monitoring solution. We were looking for a way to monitor IT structure as some years ago we began deploying a few servers and switches. Over the years, computers have spread everywhere into our offices and factory, so we needed a way to check for systems/network availability 24x7. Nagios Core was a good solution to start with.

I read the manual, set up a test server, and performed some tests. After our initial setup, I then added more servers and any IP device on our network that had SNP support (switches, sensors, printers and so on). It was my first time working with a Unix environment, and it didn't take so much time to set it up.

I did it myself.

There's no licensing costs, and I feel that monitoring is not essential software for a management board, at least until bad things happen then it becomes invaluable.

Take your time to understand how it works. Then start monitoring a small number of assets in your department and then add some device/server every day. It takes some time to tune all your checks. Once done you'll have almost everything under control. I even managed to adapt some plugins to suit my needs.

Nagios is a good choice for network monitoring. It's up to you decide if you need assistance of skilled people or try it by yourself. I was curious about Linux and Nagios was a good reason to start working with it.

Generally, it's an open source software, so it's free, and despite this, it covers all infrastructure health issues.

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. It alerts us before our customer is even aware of an issue and we can always fix it before they notice it. We can easily generate any type of notification that we went, and integrate it with other tools using any REST API which is a simple to do.

I would like to see a much better Nagios Manager GUI that can support all type of configuration items, and advance search options. They should develop a way to avoid restarting the entire application upon making any change, enable parallel checks, and improve SNMP support for SNMP traps.

I've used it for around 10 years

We had no deployment issues.

The product is quite stable, but it needs to be able to support larger amounts of hosts/services checks.

There's been no issues having it monitor our entire infrastructure.

I'm not using any customer service.

I'm not in need of any technical support.

I started with this product.

It was quite straightforward, but I would love to see an RPM package that includes all needed package dependencies.

We used an in-house team. I would advise you to learn from users past experience as it always helps.

Use the Nagios community, and go for the basic product. Design your system configuration before installing the product.

The primary use for this solution is basic network monitoring of a MPLS network.

Nagios Core informs me when my network elements are misfiring.

The most valuable feature is the performance parameters of the system. Nagios Core ill continuous monitor the endpoint for most common parameters on an obsessive mode and that will give you a better insight into the endpoint operating conditions

Please bear in mind that the Core edition is very limited in capability/features unlike the Enterprise XI . Inspite of this limitation it is a fantastic product to use at zero cost

I had deployed Nagios Core to monitor my MPLS network endpoints like routers and switches and also my firewalls and printers

It does a very good job I must say

An analogous product if I may refer to is Spiceworks which is a free tool for IT inventory and does an excellent job of monitoring inventory and reporting on the software etc on the endpoint

The core version is no match for the XI version. But the OEM should consider introducing some of the features of the XI version in the core version so that potential customers are actually compelled to to consider upgrading to the enterprise version

Supremely stable if you right size and maintain the system periodically

My old instance still runs on a Esxi VM with zero support on the hypervisor or the Nagios system its just a 2GB vRAM and single vCPU with about 40 GB storage and handles about 70 odd hosts and runs just fine apart from the log files maintenance its easy

No vendor involvement 

Tried many other similar products all demo versions hence did not take to production

Pretty straightforward to set up and configure basic system

I did it myself so no vendor is involved

Can't say coz my cost of investment is only personal effort , no money so its 100% ROI

Zero cost for the core edition but you need to know linux based apps configuration a=in general but in this case the installation and configuration guides make things a lot easy . A bit of patience and clear thinking you may end up doing a lot more in your setup than you expected !!!!

Tried many other similar products all demo versions hence did not take to production

Definitely try it out if you have zero budget 

Even if you don't have a budget restriction please do give it a try