Nagios Core Valuable Features

NV
Sr. System Administrator at Guj Info Petro Limited

I started working with Nagios Core when RHEL 5 was there & since then it is still in functioning mode various types of hosts and services have been configured such as the IBM AIX, Linux, Microsoft Windows, Cisco Routers, WLCs, Switches & certain gateway level firewalls. (Fortigate, Juniper Netscreen, Checkpoint, Radware AppDirector Load Balancer) 

As my knowledge gains, I've started deploying additional plug-ins (as stated above) to have a productive monitoring environment. 

Please Note: Nagios Exchange is a great source of plug-ins for testing purposes. 

Nagios is still functional & doing well after many years despite having 500+ nodes & 2500+ services. Moving further, the Nagios HA pilot project is in progress to have a high availability & business continuity.

In opposite to Nagios XI, Nagios Core needs to be configured through a shell console only. Though open-source GUI Content Management tools are available I'm good @ shell level only.

Using NCPA, We monitor active & passive checks both. However, Active checks mostly work well in my architecture.

The biggest difference between Nagios Core & XI is, everything comes pre-built with Nagios XI, while for Nagios Core, all add-ons need to be configured individually. 

So, Nagios Core Engineer/Administrator requires in-depth shell-based knowledge & a clear understanding of Nagios Structure for all kinds of troubleshooting.

View full review »
CA
Administrateur reseaux at Orange

I like that it's very simple to install, easy to manage and deploy, and easy to use for monitoring.

View full review »
SS
Senior Technical Support Engineer at a cloud provider with 11-50 employees

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

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Network Monitoring Software
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Nagios, Zabbix, Centreon and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
GD
Regional Portfolio Manager at First in Business Solutions

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.  

View full review »
MJ
Senior Software Engineer at Peristent Systems

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. From these groups, we can check how many servers and routers go down. 

We also like the alerting features. One of the dashboards they provide monitor total assets and how many are up and how many are down.

View full review »
Daniel Tamiru - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Database & System Administration at Awash International Bank

The application performance monitoring feature is valuable. We primarily use it for user experience monitoring and determining which layer the problem happened to resolve it.

View full review »
James Jaramillo - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Specialist at ADDI

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. If I need to add a dashboard, I can integrate it with Nagios. Cloud synchronization is wonderful.

View full review »
NV
Sr. System Administrator at Guj Info Petro Limited

The most valuable features of this product are the very lightweight code and easy-to-manage plug-ins.

Apart from the main Nagios core engine, one can add several APIs and add-ons to make the Nagios engine more stronger without compromising it's performance.

Each config parameter can be easily tuned as per individual's need. Many proven frontends are available to get performance related output from the Nagios engine.

Also, Nagios can work without any database back end. It generates a single file for each day and maintains it in a separate directory until a Linux System Admin removes it manually. In Nagios terms, it is called archiving. When someone wants an availability report for a particular server for the last year, Nagios simply fetches all of the relevant files and outputs the data within the shortest period of time. There is no need to query any database to get historical data, which puts extra burden on CPU and memory.

View full review »
JM
Admin Sys Linux at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

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

View full review »
Fahad-Siddiqui - PeerSpot reviewer
Big Data Infrastructure Consultant at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nagios Core is very configurable. Whatever you want, you can do it. We have multiple agents and scripts available with the Nagios Core portals and the internet. The cost is also very acceptable.

View full review »
Chetan_Sharma - PeerSpot reviewer
Linux System Administrator at Amity Software Systems Limited

We mostly use Nagios Core to integrate with Python and Bash Script. If there is a requirement from the client to monitor these services, and Nagios Core does not have the features, we integrate Python and Bash Script with Nagios Core to monitor the services.

View full review »
SR
IT Monitoring & IT Service Automation Product Consultant and Team Lead at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

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

View full review »
it_user873816 - PeerSpot reviewer
Strategic Staffing Solutions at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • GUI interface
  • Notification capabilities
  • Real-time reporting
View full review »
SR
Vice President - Operations & Client Support at Scicom Infrastructure Services

Nagios doesn't get the respect it deserves; most likely due to the fact that it doesn't have a licensing cost. However, when implemented correctly, this is a powerful enterprise toolset. Specifically, Nagios provides massive flexibility in terms of the types of endpoints you want to monitor (infrastructure, rudimentary application, process, and storage) and a wide variety of conditions to evaluate across including binary type conditions analysis (like threshold exceeded or not) or degrees of conditions violations (such as 30% warning; 80% critical). The dashboarding and heads up display is practical and useful for enterprise/network operations center use cases. The extensibility of Nagios also allows for integration to ticketing systems further adding value for service support and production monitoring use cases. 

View full review »
Azam S M - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

The value of the solution is that we get timely notifications if there are any issues and they can be solved immediately. Nagios provides all the plugins required. 

View full review »
Rizwan Shabbir - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at Mentor Graphics

The most valuable feature of Nagios Core is the ability to check the availability of the server for network connectivity. Additionally, the interface is good.

View full review »
BD
Manager - Service Management ( Event & Capacity ) with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is stable and fit for purpose. Various plugins are available as per your need in the open source marketplace to use and customize according to the need.

View full review »
SK
Support on banking at Aithent

I am impressed with the product's alerts and reports. 

View full review »
LE
Partner Technical Support & Escalation Manager at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

It is fairly easy to set up, and we can monitor pretty much everything we want to.

View full review »
it_user853911 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Architect at Rezgateway
  • Historical Alert records/data
  • Plugins
  • Data sources (MySQL)
  • Grouping of services and servers

We use the Alerting and Graphing to minimize the downtime. The old RRD Graph module is now used by Grafana. We outgrew the old PNP4Nagios a few weeks back. 

View full review »
AD
Systems and Virtualization Engineer at Altelios Technology Group

The most valuable feature of Nagios Core is it allows us to develop and add as many plugins as we want.

View full review »
it_user978732 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable features to us are the ability to improve memory usage, disc space usage, and the PDU load of each node.

View full review »
it_user196494 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Coordinator at a tech services company

Getting the alerts is the most valuable feature. This way I know when servers are acting up or just plainhosed. It also helps me to know which things need to be recovered and when so I do not have to bother with checking into it immediately.

View full review »
it_user69474 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The most valuable feature of Nagios is its monitoring capability. Once you configure it correctly, it will help you monitor all your servers and services.

View full review »
it_user167934 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Support Technician

It has been a reliable source of information regarding the state of the servers within the organisation and the flexibility of some of the features including the command structure has been invaluable in tracking some recurring faults.

View full review »
JE
Network Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution is quite efficient.

The system's alerts are quite good.

The solution is very complete and mostly easy to manage.

View full review »
SS
Computer Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I like the way the solution sends alerts and how it keeps on escalating them. I also find
the plugins by which you can easily add the divisions valuable.

View full review »
it_user367884 - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

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

View full review »
it_user187839 - PeerSpot reviewer
Client Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user212514 - PeerSpot reviewer
Graduate Linux System Administrator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

View full review »
it_user82485 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The Auto Inventory is valuable.

View full review »
DS
Corporate Infrastructure Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

View full review »
it_user301461 - PeerSpot reviewer
LAN/Wlan Administrator at a construction company

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.

View full review »
it_user256458 - PeerSpot reviewer
Labs infrastructure & technology team leader at a comms service provider with self employed

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

View full review »
MN
Tech consultant at select softwares

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

View full review »
it_user267174 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network and System Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The poller is really good, I can easily implement new stuff and it is scalable.

View full review »
it_user1020 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data Center at a tech company with 51-200 employees

We started experimenting with Nagios six years ago to get a feel of it as a recommended network monitoring system. We tested other products like opennms, zabbix and zenoss but we finally decided to go for Nagios as it was very extensible. At that time, only Nagios could be configured to work with our in-house developed SMS-based messaging system. This is probably the greatest advantage of Nagios - it can be customized to a degree to suit your monitoring needs. It's architecture also allows distributed monitoring, which is really a great feature to reduce network traffic.

View full review »
MJ
Network Operations Center Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The most valuable features are the reports and the way it generates the report in a graphical manner. The creating availability, the ratios, the uptime, downtime, and the outages.

View full review »
it_user84708 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We like the automatic alerting functions. Also, there are a lot of free monitoring modules available for any purpose you may need.

View full review »
it_user244500 - PeerSpot reviewer
Constructor of the computer systems at a security firm with 51-200 employees
  • Reliability
  • Security
  • Flexibility
  • Functionality
  • Availability - controllability anywhere and with different methods
View full review »
it_user2061 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Expert at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Open source and very flexible. large ecosystem of tools and custom monitors built up around nagios. All configuration is text files, so it is easy to keep this in version control and generate new configs from other tools. View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Network Monitoring Software
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Nagios, Zabbix, Centreon and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.