Nagios XI alternatives and competitors

We're an MSP. We use this solution for all of our clients. For anyone that has a network more extensive than a switch or two, we install Auvik. We do this to make sure that we're getting the right connectivity and that everything is working as it should. I get alerts whenever something goes wrong, and I can jump in and say for example, "That's there. This is why." And I can tell what is happening. If I'm not on site, I can say, "Plug this port in because whoever was there, just plugged it back into the same switch." 

Having a single integrated platform has helped improve our organization. Ease of use and speed are the most important. I always know that I can go back. I've got a solid monitoring solution within Auvik. I know I can access the solution and get the right information that is updated in real-time.

The solution helps us get ahead of issues. If I see something going on, I can start getting ahead of it before my client notices. I can at least get a heads-up right away as something's going on. It's always better to alert my customer that I found a problem rather than have them call me. There's also a perception of being proactive versus reactive.

Depending on the issue, I have seen a reduction in our MTTR.

I have absolutely seen a TTV with Auvik. The solution allows us to hit the ground running. When we get to a client, it takes me 30 minutes to an hour to absorb what that network looks like and I can start rocking and rolling immediately.

The solution's ease of use for our operations is fairly important. It's wonderful for when I'm going into a new client and I don't want to do discovery. The solution plots out a network map for me. The solution tells me where I've got congestion and additional information that would normally require me to do discovery. Auvik is not as in-depth as for example, ExtraHop but this gives me enough of an overview that I can look at a network and say, "Okay, I know where they're at. Now I know where they need to be," and gives me the first stepping stones to get acclimated to the network. 

An example of Auvik's ease of use for our operations for an existing customer is if I receive an event that needs to be worked on, whether I'm onsite or not, I can call my client and say, "Hey, if you're seeing network issues, we just caught a couple of alerts." These alerts may or may not be an issue but it's good to have that in our back pocket to say, "Okay, something else is seeing this. " It's another set of eyes. We're a small firm and we can only be in so many places at one time.

The solution provides a single integrated platform. Although the solution doesn't do everything that I would want network-wise it is good enough. For what we pay, Auvik does the job we need it to do.

Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date.

This is the first solution we deploy at every location. We bring out a machine we call a data collector, and we put it in their network, get on DHCP, and it starts to scan immediately. The solution is absolutely fantastic.

Auvik is a fantastic network monitoring solution. When I look just for something that's really focused on network, for the price, Auvik can't be beaten.

The one aspect that I dislike about the solution is that there is no current way to export diagrams. If I want to take this and say, "Okay, here's my network map," I cannot export that network map to Visio and make edits or add notes if I need to on the diagram. Those are the aspects that are really missing for me. Not every product has everything I want. But what Auvik's support has told me, is that it's in the pipeline.

The only area that I dislike about the solution is the lack of exportability. That would be a wonderful feature to have.

The exportability of the information is really where I see the big value, and the other area is when network changes occur. One thing I would like to see is the option of an automated backup shortly after a configuration has changed because Auvik monitors the configs. When it sees a new config or I move five ports from one network to another, Auvik picks up that there was a change. The solution knows that it happened, but it won't back up at that time. The ability to do rollback would be wonderful. If something breaks I will have options, "Okay, here's your latest config. Here's the previous config, do you want to roll back?"  Juniper offers that in their OS automatically and it is beautiful. This would be a wonderful update.

I would like a little bit more of a deep dive because Auvik uses flow data to update what type of traffic I'm seeing which is pretty good but it's not a hundred percent. What I'd really love to see as well, is an offering of a small appliance to do this type of work, to wash packets. 

The exportability of data and network maps can also be improved. One thing that Auvik does well is tell me how long a switch is under maintenance for. For example, if I have a switch, and everything gets pulled up into my portal for the client, I take the serial number, it goes out to Cisco or HP or whomever, and it will tell me how long that switch is under maintenance for. That's invaluable. I know that I have one source of truth I can go and look at and say, "Yeah. Hey, that switch is still good for another two years."

I have been using the solution for around two and a half to three years.

The stability is rock solid. I haven't had any issues.

The solution has done everything that we have needed it to do so far. I can't complain about the scalability. 

Any problems I've had were resolved by the technical support team. Auvik's technical support is email support first, which I'm not happy about, but I understand that that's the way they work. I haven't had an issue that was so critical that I needed the situation resolved immediately.

Positive

Previously, we used Symantec RMM. We used a couple of other items for a while, and finally, once we got onto Auvik and I showed my business partner the power of Auvik, he said, "Yeah, this is what we're going with." Literally within an hour, he said, "You just made up my mind."

The initial setup was not bad. We installed an agent on our data collector, gave it the name of the client, and told it what networks to start looking at.

The implementation was completed in-house.

What is good about Auvik is that it is a monthly spend versus a CapEx. That tends to be a bigger driver, especially for a small environment. Using a product like Auvik and having the same visibility that any tech can walk into and, assuming they've got a decent networking background, can look at it and go, "Oh, yeah. Here's what it is." With this, my client that has 15 switches doesn't need to worry if something happens to the main infrastructure person. 

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

There are certain aspects that I've had little issues with, but nothing that couldn't be resolved by support. I can't be an expert on every product. I've got ten different switching vendors I work with and have to learn the syntax. As long as I've got SNMP and I can get Telnet, who supports most of the major vendors out there, Cisco, Juniper, and Brocade. I am very much in favor of the product and the discovery capabilities therein.

Depending on the vendor, the solution reduces repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. Cisco, Juniper, or Brocade, have CLIs that Auvik can get into and do backups automatically for me, which is a need but is repetitive. Auvik does configuration backups but overall, that's the big area the solution automates for me. 

We're a regional player, we definitely have visibility to our environments.

The visibility that helps our IT team focus on our networks is fairly important. Visibility is the first building block that we have for every single client.

Auvik's automation has not necessarily affected our IT team's availability. The solution does configure backups for me, but if I wasn't using Auvik, I would be using something else to do that. For what I am using automation for, the solution is pretty freaking awesome.

We're a smaller firm, and all of our guys are in senior positions. As we move along, Auvik is going to be watched and managed by lower-caliber staff who can raise the flag and run it up to somebody as needed.

If I need to get a listing to my vendor, say, "Here are the serial numbers that I need to renew maintenance on for next year," I can't just take that and export it out of Auvik. But overall, the solution does make my life easy because I can just copy the serial numbers and give them to my vendor, whomever that may happen to be. 

Auvik as a cloud-based solution covers enough compared to an on-prem network monitoring solution. It does a good enough job, without being on-premise. The solution is fairly lightweight and it's fairly innocuous. Auvik doesn't cause any problems on the network, it sits there and receives. Auvik is a very good passive solution.

I recommend the solution. This is a good product, it's easy to set up, and just give it the once over. I think that it's one of these solutions that can really add value. Depending on the size of your network, it might be small enough and it might be the right size to help you get your hands wrapped around it. I haven't seen the solution in an environment of more than 500 users. That is my scale limit on Auvik, but I know that the solution goes further. The smallest environment in which I have seen the solution used was in a doctor's office that had three switches.

We use it for monitoring our software for illegal components. We look to Centreon to provide a visual representation of the availability of a service.

We use the soluton's dashboard for L1, L2, and L3 IT support. We set alarms and then support can look at the interface to see which element is causing an alarm. It is useful for monitoring and seeing, in a graphical way, what the cause is.

The software shows the data structure with other elements that represent the state of the software. With Centreon, we have automated the way we check for the check file and it automatically creates alarms in our ITSM system.

The most valuable feature is the ability to build an abstraction of service visualization. You can add services to an entity called Business Activities and you can see the state of these activities.

It also provides a nice dashboard, or what's called the Centreon MAP, and you can extract information very well from that for building reports for customers. It gives you a representation of service and business activities. You can access all the information in one place.

We also use Centreon Plugin Packs. They help us support Linux servers' operating systems. When it comes to monitoring things, you can set an agent on the client's operating system or you can have agentless access. For the agent-based monitoring, you need to install it directly on each OS that you want to monitor. For agentless monitoring, you can simply click through the interface to provide a Plugin Pack, and you can run it directly.

It can also help you look at KPIs because calculations can be done directly in Centreon.

Centreon is very bad with auto-scanning. It's very monolithic software. It doesn't have microservices and it only has basic clustering. You cannot, for example, have six or seven nodes for Centreon's cloud processes.

Another area for improvement is auto-remediation.

I have been using Centreon for three years.

The stability depends... For example, on Amazon, we have some problems with processes that fall and we need to restart them. And the software that provides the dashboard is very bad. 

The core service is not fantastic but it's okay.

The scalability of Centreon is very bad because of the nature of the software. It creates a bottleneck at some point and that drives everything else related to the software. 

I believe Centreon is working on a SaaS version of the service, but currently, you cannot have many hosts because of the cost of only one computer or virtual machines. Amazon permits 128 processors and, for VMware, I think it's 28. If you already have 28 CPUs and you add one more, the monitor is dead.

We don't have plans to increase our usage. We have bought Dynatrace and we will be removing Centreon in the next six months.

We have about 150 users of Centreon. Some are managers but they are generally technical people such as project managers and support. I'm the only one involved in deployment and maintenance of the solution.

Centreon's L3 support is great but the L1 and L2 support are bad. The response times depend on the person who responds to the call, but it's not great.

Neutral

We used to use Nagios. The switch to Centreon was not my personal choice, but it was done because we needed access to abstractions, and that is something Nagios cannot do. Nagios doesn't have the same features. You cannot represent things on dashboards like in Centreon.

Personally, I don't have a preference for one over the other. Management made the final choice, but in my opinion, it was for the cosmetic aspects of the product.

It's very simple to set up. A very basic installation takes, perhaps, 50 minutes. You download a package and install it, and then do some configuration. There's nothing special about it.

After, you need IT to structure your business activities with the service. There are some post-configuration operations that need to be done.

We did it by ourselves.

We have seen ROI using Centreon. When you can monitor your whole system there is a gain.

The price is not too high. Licensing is driven by how many hosts you monitor, but because you can run the agentless version, you don't have to declare every host to Centreon, one at a time. That means you can drive your infrastructure supervision with a very low number of declared hosts.

It's very simple to use Centreon's licensing model. When you know the number of hosts, you know the cost of your license. The price includes everything, there are no additional costs.

By comparison, Dynatrace is priced by the number of user agents in the infrastructure being monitored. It's a strict usage calculation for SaaS software like Dynatrace.

Centreon is a nice product that improves on Nagios at times but it's not a very big step forward. Centreon is very much like Nagios.

I would only recommend Centreon for a customer that is not an IT client. It's not great for tuning software and you cannot have more than, say, 5,000 hosts. You can only monitor a small or mid-sized environment. If you need to monitor AWS, you cannot use Centreon, and that's true in general if you need a very large number of instances of Centreon.

Centreon can help to improve the availability of service but that's all. It does enable, for example, fine-tuning of transactions between two applications. It provides a very binary vision. It helps, but it only helps IT support.

Centreon is a great product but it needs to mature. It's a very young company and they need to improve the solution, but the product itself is great.

ControlUp is used by us specifically to monitor user sessions, drilling down to that user-specific level to look at metrics on that level.

There are numerous useful features.

We were missing that component. We have another tool for infrastructure monitoring at the physical hardware level.

The most valuable feature is the granularity of visibility into the resources that are in use by our applications. 

What we were looking for was something that could drill down into that granular view to look at things like what applications a specific user is running, what kind of resources those applications are using, and login times. Really, you name it, anything you'd want to see at the user level.

The most common complaint that I have heard, at least within our organization, is about reporting. 

They have their own reporting. It's just that it doesn't yet include everything that you can look at within the application. You can only report on specific metrics or collections.

I would like to see more on setting up alerts. As an example, as previously stated, there is reporting, but there are also alerts, such as if this specific user is using this much CPU or RAM, send an email to this person informing them. Something along those lines, that alerting portion, I believe they need to improve on, but we would like to see at the very least.

I have been using ControlUp for two years.

We didn't have any major issues in terms of stability.

I would say that, as expected, getting everything configured and working properly took some time when we first got it set up. But, aside from that, I wouldn't say we have had any major outages or problems.

Overall, the product is quite stable.

It is used in five different data centers where we have deployments. In each data center, we have what is known as a monitor server. In that sense, it's flexible and scalable in that you can continue to add monitor servers in different locations to add more load and data. ControlUp is considered to be scalable.

You do it in such a way that the licensing is based on the number of machines that you're monitoring, rather than per monitor server.

The cost is determined by the number of machines being monitored. When you add more machines to monitor, the pricing increases.

I would say it wasn't as responsive as we had hoped at first.

We did have that consultant come out and help us with the initial setup, as I mentioned, but it did take a little time to get responses from the support team when we first started. 

I think a lot of that was just because it was a new product at the time, and they seemed to be scaling the company to help with that growth.

In terms of turnaround time, it's recently improved significantly.

I would rate the technical support a four out of five.

When it comes to monitoring Windows systems, it is definitely more user-friendly.

I understand that Nagios XI was initially designed to focus on Linux systems, with Windows appearing to be an afterthought. It appears that the primary focus of this product is Windows systems rather than Linux. It can still monitor Linux systems, but that is not its primary focus.

The initial setup was complex. However, they did send someone out as a point of contact to walk us through everything. They even collaborated with us to create a diagram and an overall plan. They had a lot of assistance in that regard.

It was done in-house, with ControlUp supervision. There were there to guide us through any difficulties, or any obstacles that we may have found during the process

Personally, I would say that the only thing I could compare it to is another monitoring tool that we use, Nagios. And, in comparison, it is more expensive, but it has a much newer user interface. It has more contemporary features.

I would definitely recommend it. As I previously stated, a lot of it, in my opinion, comes down to what your use case is, or what you hope to gain from the product. 

I can't speak on the subject of physical monitoring because, as I previously stated, we don't use it for that. I am not sure how well it performs in that regard, but if you're looking for something that gets really granular and goes beyond the physical layer into the virtual, into the user sessions, we weren't able to find anything that gave us that same view.

It is suitable for both an SMB and also enterprise because it's based on the number of machines you're licensing. If you are a small business with only 30, 50 machines to monitor, your costs will be much lower than if you're monitoring 5,000. It appears to be able to accommodate both sides of that.

I would rate ControlUp an eight out of ten.

In Amazon CloudWatch, I found their data analytics services most valuable. They are what we are looking for. We are utilizing Kinesis Data Firehose, Logstash Elastic, and CloudWatch Logs. There are many services that we are using, and in our case, we are using three.

An area for improvement that we want to see in Amazon CloudWatch is a more realistic monitoring. It's real-time data stream monitoring we are looking for. Our application is a huge application that will run on AWS. It has a lot of services that are running, so we want to monitor those services, e.g. message review and frontend application in ELB (Elastic Load Balancing).

It's not only monitoring that we want to do. We also want to visualize that monitoring data through dashboards. This is the main reason we plan to try Datadog because in Datadog, we can create a dashboard and we can visualize the log data through the dashboard.

We are not happy about the dashboards. In Amazon CloudWatch, they can fetch all the logs, but the service is not good at delivering the data into the dashboard, plus there's the lack of real data, e.g. in application performance monitoring. We find this product lacking and this is why we want to look for a new service that can cover our needs.

Additional features we would like to see in the future on this product include more API performance features, e.g. application performance monitoring. We also want live dashboards and well-designed workflows.

We also want integrative services, e.g. custom logs we can check, as we are not satisfied with what Amazon CloudWatch currently has. We are looking for more competency on these services: dashboards, real-time monitoring, real user monitoring, and application performance monitoring. We also have more and more mobile apps, so mobile app monitoring is also important.

These are the key areas that people are looking for, and what we'd like to see on this product in the future.

I've been using Amazon CloudWatch for over six years.

Amazon CloudWatch is scalable to some extent.

Technical support for this product is okay. They have a different support standard which they are maintaining. When you pay for premium support, you'll get your issue resolved within two hours. If it is standard support, it takes one to two days. The support you get depends on the type of support you paid for.

This solution is easy to set up. It's not complex. You just need to run the Amazon CloudWatch agent in all the services. Once we install the agent into our services, we'll be able to fetch the log regularly.

I evaluated Nagios.

We're using Amazon CloudWatch. Our clients are using different monitoring services. Some are using Prometheus, while some are using Nagios, but in our platform overall, all the services are located in AWS only.

I have no advice for people looking into using Amazon CloudWatch, but in our case, all our services are running on the AWS platform, so initially we thought of using all their cloud-based native services to save on admin and infrastructure costs, including other connectivities. That was our plan initially, but now client requirements have been more demanding.

The client wants a real-time monitoring solution which is something we are unable to get from the product, so we are looking for a new solution like Datadog, or New Relic, or Prometheus.

My rating for Amazon CloudWatch is a seven out of ten.

I'm a consumer and I'm working in a company like Accenture. It's a service-based organization. It's a MNC (multinational corporation), so it's global and we have multiple clients. These multiple clients have different strategies and they want their applications to be set up in the Cloud. I'm the AWS architect, so I do the solutions and provide solutions for them, e.g. cost optimization, infrastructure optimization, etc.

What clients find most challenging thing in the Cloud is monitoring, so we are looking for a centralized monitoring solution where we can get everything in a single window, but we want a service that's similar to Amazon CloudWatch. We collect data and we need to analyze that log and analyze the metrics, so we create a refined monitoring data, then we publish it by using the Amazon QuickSight dashboard. There are three different services we have to use, so instead of using all these different services, we want to use only one service: a centralized monitoring service to meet all our needs. This is what we are looking to have in the future.

We're using AppDynamics Server Monitoring for the IT infrastructure and server of the customers.

What I like most about AppDynamics Server Monitoring is that it's easy to manipulate and easy to implement. All solutions have the same features, but what sets AppDynamics Server Monitoring apart is that it's really quick to implement.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring has a great interface. As a developer, it doesn't matter whether it's SolarWinds, Dynatrace, or any APM you're using, but it would matter to the customer. A product must be easy to manipulate or use, for example, AppDynamics Server Monitoring, for the customer, but for developers like my team, there's no pressure, even if a solution requires coding.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring has room for improvement in terms of pricing. If the price could be cheaper, it would be great for both the customer and the integrator.

What I'd like to see in the next release of AppDynamics Server Monitoring is a better dashboard for the customer. The dashboard should be more interactive.

I've been using AppDynamics Server Monitoring for three years now.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring is a stable solution. Its stability is good.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring can be scaled up and down according to your needs, so it's a scalable solution.

I find the technical support for AppDynamics Server Monitoring interactive and quick. You can get support WebEx sessions, and if I would rate support from one to five, I'd give a five.

My company works with a lot of solutions as it's an integration provider. For example, I work with AppDynamics Server Monitoring, and a colleague works with SolarWinds. Another colleague works with Kubernetes. The team works with different monitoring solutions, including Nagios.

Setting up AppDynamics Server Monitoring is easy. It's not hard to implement. It's straightforward and quick, and even the architecture isn't that complex. The solution is easy to implement.

I'm rating the setup for AppDynamics Server Monitoring five out of five because it's very easy. Sometimes, you might find some difficulty, but the support team can help resolve that quickly.

The pricing for AppDynamics Server Monitoring in Africa and the Middle East is too expensive, so it's very hard to sell it to customers. If there could be different pricing or package for the region, that would be great.

My company pays for the license of AppDynamics Server Monitoring on a per-agent, per-server basis. It's $700 to $1000 per server, and it's paid annually. My company is on a subscription model for the solution.

On a scale of one to five, where one is expensive and five is cheap, my rating for the price of AppDynamics Server Monitoring is a two.

I'm using the monitoring solution AppDynamics Server Monitoring.

My rating for AppDynamics Server Monitoring is nine out of ten.

My company is a reseller/integrator of AppDynamics Server Monitoring.