Nagios XI Reviews

The company used to use ManageEngine, however, it was not delivering what we were really trying to produce. The benefit of Nagios is, as we are an MVNO company, an MVME company actually, we actually had to deliver monitoring based on in-house solutions. We needed to write code over our own monitoring solution. Nagios has provided us a little bit of that help as, in our proof of concept, it proved to be useful due to the fact that it's easier also for the network operations center to understand the type of monitors that are being raised. I recall we had a number of POCs at the time, and Nagios seemed to be the perfect candidate and therefore we kept using it.

It's easy to use. You provide what you want and you can monitor what you really want. 

As long as you develop your own codes, it is fine. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The solution is pretty stable.

Technical support is helpful. 

The pricing has recently risen. I know they've changed what is covered under the license, however, it doesn't change the way we use it and adds nothing to our experience, and yet we now have to pay more.

An optional delivery from their end in order to greatly produce some sort of a HA, high availability solution, would be ideal. At present, if I have a solution and Nagios is instanced in a particular data center and another Nagios solution in another data center, when you buy the license, you can eventually have different types of licenses. One will be a stand-by and the other will be a disaster recovery solution. What's missing from the Nagios side is the idea of having some sort of synchronization between the two instances. 

If I have a stand-by solution and I need ticketing as an active solution, I need to do many things manually. For example, I need to manually do ticketing on the backup and restore it on the other. It would be a good idea for some sort of mechanism, like a sort of clustering, which can help a lot for people out there who need something in an active-standby solution. I'm not sure this will be available out there even on other solutions, like Zabbix, for example, That said, I don't think they're really digging into this kind of scenario.

When you start deploying thousands of monitors, especially in a big company, for example, you have to take care, as that you cannot keep on pushing into one solution. It can become inefficient. They say it's specifically that when you skip an X amount of monitors, Nagios starts behaving differently. 

I really don't like the idea of the certification provided by them. As a company and as a team lead, I have other people who were interested in doing some certifications, coming from the management. However, they did not provide any sort of training, which gives you the independence to do an exam. It's like they just provide a simple document for you to read and then just to apply in the exam, just to be Nagios certified. On top of that, that kind of document is very old. I asked them if they had anything up-to-date. They told me that's what they have even though it's clear it's very old quality for the current engine that Nagios is currently built on. There were quite a number of upgrades - at least five. At the same time, Zabbix certification offers you training beforehand and then you can opt for either a certification or an exam.

I've used the solution since about 2018. It's been about three or four years at this point.

For the most part, the solution is stable. There were some cases with stability, especially, for example, unexpected issues that you are not aware of at first. All of a sudden you notice that just as an example, the graphs are not actually graphing, all of a sudden. That said, it's very, very, very minimal. We don't experience big issues with Nagios. And yet, it is why we introduced the idea of having a geo-redundancy solution, so that we can also, if something happens, immediately switch and then concentrate to work efficiently on the one having issues.

We use the support forum. In fact, it's part of the license. Even if you're just a member of the forum, you can still receive quick responses. We use it a lot and we ask questions. I can say that I'm happy with the way they eventually reply to you as they at least help, in any case. We had situations where we used support while we debugged everything ourselves. Through the years, and in 2008, we started merging all of our stuff onto the Nagios platform. Truthfully, in the last three to four years, I haven't seen that many massive issues. The platform is quite stable. Therefore, we don't use support too much.

We previously used ManageEngine.

I'm also familiar with Zabbix, for example, as it's quite the same concept. The difference is that maybe Nagios was a little bit easier for deployments.

We did a POC with DataDog as well and have begun to work with BigPanda.

The initial setup is not overly complex. It's pretty straightforward. 

There is the Nagios Core, which is free. Then, of course, you have the Nagios XI, which is paid.

I found that lately when we went to renew the license, the difference was a little bit higher. It was around a higher percentage different than last year. That made us a little bit concerned. For a point in time, I was just checking to see if there is something that might go head to head with Nagios and maybe be a little bit cheaper. While browsing and checking out a few, I met also with the Pandora MS and looked at it as a less expensive option.

I've been looking at this solution in comparison to Pandora.

We are a customer of Nagios, actually. We provide the monitoring solution within the company.

It's a virtualized solution, however, it's not really on a cloud as we typically have our own data centers. We applied it on a Hypervisor platform. It's a virtualized solution. Then, of course, we opt for the redundancy part by having different data centers. 

It's the same setup as Zabbix as well. Typically, you have a number of data centers globally, and then you concentrate it, for example, in our case, to various data centers and we usually do redundancy for. Therefore, we have the active solution and the standby solution, just in case there is a disaster.

If you are a mid-sied company with an eye on expansion, this solution is very good. I'd recommend it to others. it's easy to use and to deploy.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use Nagios XI to monitor all of our network assets.

We use Nagios as a network discovery tool. We use Nagios to maintain our uptime statistics and to monitor our services. It has allowed us to be much more sophisticated in our monitoring and alerting.

It's a monitoring agent. It's designed to do one thing. Its most valuable feature is its monitoring.

I would like them to have better public cloud discovery. 

I would like to be able to extend it to all of our data centers, whether they are in the cloud or not. It would be helpful if I could connect everywhere.

I have been using Nagios XI for two years.

Nagios XI is stable. The stability is great.

Nagios XI is scalable. It covers our data.

We have eight users in our organization who are network administrators, engineers, and senior operations staff.

It is extensively being used. It currently covers two entire data centers.

There are approximately 600 assets in total. We're not sure if we are going to extend its usage. We are implementing our hybrid cloud strategy, and it will most likely not be suitable for monitoring our public cloud assets. 

We will not be using this solution in the future, but I wanted to explain why. If it could, which is sort of can, there are better options for us in AWS and Azure for our use cases. We're unlikely to extend it to the cloud, but as long as our data centers are operational, we'll continue to use it.

Technical support is generally good. I would rate them a four out of five.

Positive

We used a solution previously, but I don't recall what it was.

The initial setup was satisfactory. 

It wasn't any better or worse than the others. 

It was difficult to configure, but not more complex than others similar to it.

It took a few months to complete the deployment. We deployed from scratch, we had to upgrade the network.

The deployment was done in-house.

We only need two people to deploy and maintain this solution; it is very simple.

Our service statistics aren't particularly impressive, but we have seen a return on investment.

I would rate it a five out of five.

It's an essential part of our infrastructure, and we'll keep using it.

Licensing costs are reasonable. It's approximately $6,000.00.

It's good value for the money.

There were no additional fees in addition to the standard licensing fee.

We used the enterprise version; we started with the pay-as-you-go version, but the real one is much better.

With any changes to the network's planning, It did require downtime, don't rush it. Make sure you're resilient and take it slowly. You don't have to start doing everything at once, but you should start with your most important assets.

I would rate Nagios XI an eight out of ten.

It is a very good solution to monitoring infrastructure of IT services.

It's got very nice tools. We have notifications via email or short messages via SMS.

It's great for monitoring IT services infrastructure. You can monitor all your servers, your database, and server virtualization. 

I don't have any problem with the Nagios XI. It's the best. 

For some, it may be difficult to deploy. The process could be simplified. 

We'd like to see more integration capabilities. 

There's a bit of complexity in the product in general. It could be simplified overall. 

I've been using the solution for ten years. 

It's very, very stable. We don't have a problem with the stability of the solution. It's a very stable solution. It is the best solution for monitoring any IT infrastructure for all companies.

I don't have a problem with the scalability of Nagios XI.

We have people from many teams using the solution. Right now, we have ten users on the solution. 

We haven't needed to contact support since we have a very big, strong senior engineering team. We have very good experience in-house in order to manage and configure the solution and resolve the problem. If we needed support, we have the contacts within the company logistically. We can open a ticket. For now, we don't need any support since the solution is very easy. Even with deployment, we don't need any support.

I'm also familiar with Cacti. If you compare it with Cacti or any other solution, Nagios is the best.

I'm trying to use the SolarWinds solution as well. It's very easy to deploy if you compare it with other solutions. The efficacy and the time it takes to deploy this solution are very short compared to Cacti or SolarWinds or other solutions. Even the cost and lack of complexity are great.

The initial setup is not a big problem for me. We just integrated Nagios XI with the solution to send SMS notifications. It might be very complex for other technicians and engineering. For me, I have good knowledge about integrating XI with other solutions. It can be a very complex task if a person is not knowledgeable.

We have six administrators that are in security and networking, and they are working with this solution in our company. We have a help desk and security team working with the product.

I was able to deploy the solution myself.

I don't have any visibility on the ROI.

I don't deal with the licensing aspect of the product.

We use different deployments of the solution. All versions are very similar. 

I have installed and deployed a large number of servers, both physical and virtual, and a large number of switches, routers, wifi devices, and printers. You can monitor any devices, servers, and services with the Nagios XI, including SMTP, TCP, HTTP, DNS, et cetera.

I'd recommend the solution to others.

I'd rate it overall ten out of ten.

I use Nagios to monitor LTE modems. We have more than 24,000 modems on a single instance of Nagios.

We also use this software to monitor several KPIs regarding to CPE devices, and items in our IT department infrastructure when we started eight years ago.

We use plugins provided by Nagios XI to monitor our infrastructure equipment, OS, Databases and Services from easy to use wizards in monitoring panel. Also, we add some additional features to this monitoring system based on our organization needs. 

Nagios is stable and it's easy to use the monitoring software, which is why we chose this product. There is no limitation exist to monitor every measurable parameters and KPIs. Every known devices and services parameters has own plugins in this monitoring system and for special cases, it`s possible to write script and monitor results.

1. Reporting items needs more improvement and need to be more flexible based on customer needs

2. Clustering feature need to be implemented for large environment. Some solutions introduced in official website such as Mod-Gearman and Nagios Fusion but the first one implemented by third party and second one is not include management control and just a central view from several instances. I think Nagios should implement an official solution for clustering for enterprise and large scales that should be included database solution as well. 

I have eight years of experience working with Nagios XI. I have a lot of experience using this monitoring software.

We are using the latest version.

It's a stable solution. We have not had any issues.

We have more than 100 users and plan to continue to use this solution.

We don't have technical support for Nagios because we are living in Iran and we have embargoes, so we cannot use the technical support from Nagios. We use local support.

I use Solarwinds and CACTI before using Nagios but both of them has some concerns.

We cannot add any feature to Solarwinds because it is none open source

CACTI is graphing tool and it cannot help us to alerting issues. Some plugins are implemented for this purpose for CACTI such as Thold plugin but it has not complete feature such as Nagios. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to install, but you need some information about the Linux operating system.

It took less than one hour to deploy.

I completed the implementation myself.

We have a team of three engineers to maintain this solution.

Nagios Core does not have any payment, but Nagios XI requires payment for the license and support.

Solarwinds

CACTI

PRTG

For anyone who is interested in using this solution, I would recommend it. This monitoring software is easy to use and is very powerful. 

This monitoring system has a powerful engine. I have many devices being monitored by a single instance, and it can show that this software works well.

I would rate Nagios XI an eight out of ten.

Nagios is our cloud-based monitoring system. We need to deploy it and integrate with our CRM, customer portal and the ticketing system as an end to end customer support platform. We use it for monitoring and gathering data from our customer service equipment.

We have more than 100 people using the solution and 3 people to do the maintenance.

Nagios XI has a custom API feature, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature.

In fact, Nagios XI grant access to administrator to use official common backend commands and callback functions developed by Nagios in custom APIs, so custom APIs could be created as an standard web services without degradation in performance and access to needed data easily. This APIs will be registered and listed in Component Management and administrator could be able to manage them as well. Also, Authentication will be done by creating unique Token for each user created in Nagios XI User Management automatically and it could be used in calling each APIs to manage access level of caller user.

All documentation and examples about creating custom APIs are available in "Help" tab in monitoring GUI and each person with moderate level of knowledge about development in PHP language  (Needless to say it required admin privilege), can create this kind of web services. 

We often need to develop custom plugins to get Nagios to work the way we want it to work because the features we need are not always available in Nagios. Some products such as Zabbix have a software monitoring system built-in, such as the Prometheus monitoring system. It can use the features to monitor cloud systems. This would be a useful feature to include in Nagios XI. Nagios has some plugins to monitor clouding systems, but this feature on Zabbix is so handy and so user-friendly. I think it can be added to the Nagios monitoring system.

Nagios is stable, but we are using mod-Gearman for distributing the solution. There is network limitation on this, such that if the network is not stable, the whole solution is also, not stable.

Because we are working in Iran, we have embargoes, and this means we don't have any support from Nagios support. As a result, we have to use self-study. We research using Google and nagios forum this has helped us to resolve our issues.

Set up in Nagios is complex. However, it's okay once you have done this task a few times, so you understand the logic. Once you have done that, it is easy to use.

We also compared the product to Zabbix.

I would recommend this solution because it's so powerful with no limitation, especially when using the XI version. I would rate Nagios 8 out of 10. Overall, I find it to be a very good solution.

We have installed  Nagios Core and Nagios XI on many customers in Latam successfully. A good use case was one customer with many servers (upper 1000) and many routers and switches (upper 2000), they wanted to monitoring operating systems and switches ports, Nagios worked like to swiss watch.

With Nagios, I can monitor since a phone on a desk to very big servers of any company. Also, I can monitor a software made in-house to software of bigger companies. Nagios is great for verify quality and quantity in a datacenter. Nagios can show if there are problems showed behavior in datacenters.

The community, Nagios XI is made on Nagios Core base, and the community makes plugins on almost any language of programming. Nagios is not owned by any brand.

The second feature is Nagios is very friendly, if you can customize the tool to the specific environment.

If you want the best security: Log Server is better. If you need in-depth networking, I recommend Network Analyzer. If you want any other implementation of Nagios, the best is Nagios Fusion.

More than ten years.

Nagios is very stable, We haven't reports on problems with the Nagios servers in never opportunities.

You should be careful when you monitor many hardwares with many softwares, the performance of one license could be compromised. You need to manage more than one license if you have an infrastructure which is very large.

10 out of 10.

Yes, I have used other solutions. I switched to Nagios, because Nagios is not linked with any brand that's independent. This is good because you can monitor any brand of switches, routers, servers, central phones, etc.

The initial configuration is very easy. The complex is customizing the solution.

We are an expert consultant, who implements for customers.

It's complicated answer this question, but the ROI depends on Datacenter.

It is good to contact experts for advice about what is the best solution for your specific infrastructure and enterprise.

I evaluated Zenoss, Zabbix, SolarWinds, and other solutions.

You will need an expert consultant for the best implementation.

Nagios XI is a simple monitoring tool with performance management and everything a standard monitoring tool provides.

Nagios XI doesn't provide scripting. For example, if we have built up multiple IPX tunnels from a base location to a data center location and want to monitor or trigger an alert if the tunnel goes down, Nagios XI does not automatically send alerts notifying us that the tunnel is down. This is a feature we want, and in the past, Nagios completed scripting for us, but it didn't work out well.

In addition, Nagios XI doesn't have a feature where we can push the configuration from the server to all our devices. For example, if there are 500 devices in our network and we need to write down a simple command like a show clock or want to write the configuration, we cannot execute this command on all of our devices. We have already raised this issue with Nagios, and they told us they would speak with the BU team to see if this can be applied in the next release. If they do, it will come with an additional license.

Another feature we want is the IP SLA Tracking in Cisco. For example, if our ISP connection is traversing through an L2 point, which is a layer two point, we don't have IP-to-IP communication to track those interfaces. So if we need to implement something end-to-end and the interface goes down, we should get alerts for that. And if the interface goes down, there should be specific behaviour so that our traffic can switch over from the LAN or the WAN. That is not in the current Nagios deployment, but they have advised they are working on it.

We have been using this solution for nine months, and it is a cloud-based solution on Azure.

It is a stable solution. 

It is a scalable solution. 

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. If we were to use a solution other than Nagios XI, it would be SolarWinds. The current problems we have with Nagios XI are easily deployed in SolarWinds. In addition, the reporting structure could be more streamlined.

In total, our company has 900 employees and I work on a four-member administrative security team. All of our company's infrastructure is covered by Nagios XI, including our server, databases, switches, router, and data center. We use a hybrid setup that combines a virtual and physical local server with a cloud server. We implemented Nagios XI in our data center because it's installed in a VM, or virtual machine, and works easily with this data server.

Nagios XI helps us monitor the bandwidth of the internet connection, HTTP, DNS, active directory services, and exchange data availability. We have multiple servers to monitor databases, availability of servers, and ping. SMTP services can be monitored with Nagios XI. We use Nagios' mail features to send email alerts to the IT team to let them know we have an issue on our server, a problem with the databases, or updates about the availability of a server.

I would like to see Nagios integrate the team mail with the SMS gateway so we can send text alerts. It's difficult to use. To activate this option, you have to activate something from another script then use a shell script to integrate via another gateway SMS. Also, it would be great if it were integrated with another solution to generate logs, like PCM, AlienVault, or Splunk. We want alerts integrated with a system to generate logs. AlienVault and Splunk could enable this option. It is really difficult to integrate Nagios XI with another system to generate logs and alert our management of failures in security infrastructure.

I have 10 years of experience with Nagios.

The database is stable and I don't have any problems with the solution.

I think it's average. It's not fast, but I think it's okay. For the price, I think the quality of support is normal.

For our country in North Africa, it's expensive and we could purchase another solution for that price. But it's a reasonable price if we're speaking in international terms. If we compare it with another solution in the global IT world, then I think it's a reasonable price.

I would rate Nagios XI eight out of 10.