Nagios XI Reviews

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.

On-premises

This solution is being used to monitor hundreds of servers at startup. It checks disk usage, services, memory usage, and more.  

It has improved the task of network monitoring.

The most valuable feature is the dashboard, where I can have a single screen that provides a summary for hundreds of servers. I get red and green indicators that help me to quickly check for and rectify problems.

When you monitor a lot of things it creates a lot of events and logs. I would like a much easier GUI so that I can delete events and logs, which will free up a lot of space. I would also like a better GUI for dashboard viewing.

A better interface would allow this solution to be used as a single point of monitoring.

When the database is in need of repair, perhaps due to corruption caused by an improper shutdown, then it should happen automatically, rather than having to run a command.

Between seven and eight years.

The stability of this solution is quite good.

If the machine crashes and it goes down, without properly shutting down the virtual machine, then I get an error that requires the database to be repaired.

There are four or five people that browse the dashboard.

I dealt with technical support for a few months, but because I do not have a support contract I have not used it in several years. A support contract can be purchased separately.

If problems arise then you are able to fix things on your own. If you can't, then just leave it.

I am also using KS-Soft Advanced HostMonitor, but only for monitoring the up or down status of the machines. It has a much better icon view of the dashboard. When our customer wants to look at their data center and see the status of all branches and all servers, it shows a much better, color-coded graphical form. I am in the process of purchasing additional licenses for HostMonitor so that I can have multiple dashboards running from a single machine.

I did not switch solutions, but I am always open to products that offer a better user interface.

The initial setup for this solution is quite easy. I am running it on a VM platform.

The deployment happens over time as the environment changes, but the initial deployment took one or two days. For the server to monitor, you just have to set the SNMP and add it onto the Nagios platform. As more servers are added, you add them to the platform.

We took care of the implementation in-house. One person is sufficient for deployment and maintenance.

This solution is very expensive, at approximately $5,000 USD when I purchased it, which is why I haven't upgraded my version in several years.

I am using the original version of the software that I purchased because I do not have a support contract. This means that I have not received support or updates in several years.

While this solution works, I think that it can be improved in terms of maintenance, support, and price.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

Network monitoring and topology: Network monitoring and topology are important for my job rules, because I'm a system and network administrator. I need to have information in real-time about the topology of the network and monitoring of the switches, routers, and servers.

Nagios XI helped me to draw the network and check for system failures.

The Configuration Wizard needs improvement, because not all vendors are present.

About 1 year.

No.

No.

Though I downplayed the administrative NCC GUI, this is by far the strongest aspect of the Nagios XI product. In my early days of exposure to Nagios, I was using the Nagios Core product which was configured by manually editing system configuration files and then performing a system configuration verification step. This was a very cumbersome method of configuration of the respective Nagios functions. It was like the old days of software compilers where one would troubleshoot a code set by trial and error, solving source-code issues one error at a time. This was an exacting approach for Nagios system configuration, but very slow.

Nagios XI allows my customer to monitor literally thousands of network and computing endpoints (both hardware and software) in real time, including custom derived SNMP polling and traps. One can even write custom scripts that are embedded as part of the Nagios monitoring footprint.

The product could be optimized to improve the administrative user experience via the Nagios Core Configuration (NCC) GUI module.

I have been immersed in this solution for the past eight months.

The NCC does have issues where it locks up or an admin cannot be sure if the system configuration was exact. I end up saving the system configuration from the Nagios XI native MySQL DB storage paradigm to the old Nagios Core flat file paradigm to confirm proper configuration of the Nagios system.

The new Nagios XI product has been designed from the ground up to support a highly scaleable paradigm.

In general, tech support is available as needed but it is not inexpensive. Response times are generally within 24 hours, but there are times when this is not the case.

I originally used the Nagios Core solution (first one out of the gate many years ago) which had no GUI for system configuration. One had to manually edit system configuration files to customize the Nagios system for specific functional needs.

Configuring the Nagios engine is not a trivial task. Functional components build on top of each other as one defines the system configuration. One has to define the atomic components and then build moiré complex functions on top of those atomic components. This is cumbersome, but it also gives a system designer much flexibility in customizing their own solution.

Considering I come from the software engineering world, it reminds me of the power of the original C software compiler, where respective language easily enabled one to flip individual bits in a data stream. Today’s software compilers are much more simple and one can build high-level projects much quicker, but they do not provide easy access to low-level “bit-flipping” tricks. This is my opinion of the older Nagios Core product versus the newer Nagios XI product.

I recommend that my customer start at the low end of the cost spectrum to determine if a Nagios solution is a good fit for their organization. That customer can then grow into the higher-priced scale as they learn how to utilize the features for Nagios XI.

I am familiar with other pricey pay-for network monitoring solutions. The Nagios Core solution is an open source and free product and allows customers to get their feet wet without doling out tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars for a product they may not like. The pay-for solutions provide ample customer support, but if one is willing to pull up a chair and learn the Nagios solution from the ground up, it is well worth the time, versus extensive dollars, investment. And Nagios is highly customizable by the end-user.

As I stated above, I would recommend getting one of the Nagios “for Dummies” configuration books (Nagios: Building Enterprise-Grade Monitoring Infrastructures for Systems and Networks (second edition)) and start with the free/open-source Nagios Core product. Once one gains a basic understanding of said solution they can then graduate up to the Nagios XI Enterprise product for a fraction of the cost of other pay-for network monitoring solutions. By taking this approach one learns the basic building blocks of the Nagios paradigm before being immersed in the Nagios XI Enterprise world. Like I stated previously, the time investment up front is well worth the dollar savings in the end.

I think that the most important feature of Nagios is that you can write your own plugin, so you are able to create your monitoring system based on what you need.

For example, I'm using a backup system that writes in a file when it's done. If this file is empty it means that the backup fails: well i've written a Nagios plugin to check this so i can be sure if a backup is ok or not.

We're managing servers and services that needs constantly monitoring so I've implemented a monitoring system Nagios-based to alert me when something bad happens. For example, if a server goes down this system sends me a notification When a service becomes critical, it notifies me so i can check. This improve our time to handle problems and can make us proactive to customers.

I think that the community needs to concentrate development to get a standard GUI (Adagios is a side project) and gives the user a better notification system. For my system, I've developed the notifications because it basically just sends you an email.

I tested Nagios at university for seven years, and have been using it intensively for three years.

It has no particular needs or configuration to works well. Actually i'm using it in a virtual environment with a Debian-based OS.

There have been no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues scaling it.

Customer Service:

I haven't had to use it.

Technical Support:

I haven't had any need to use it.

Nagios setup is very simple. You can find some problem during plugin configuration or host configuration if you don't use a GUI like Adagios. If you use both it's easy to setup and configure your host and services.

I implemented it in-house.

The ROI is absolutely linked to time. You can save a lot of time using Nagios monitoring because otherwise you need to check all of your services or system one by one.

There are several alternative to Nagios like Icinga (which is a 2.0 Nagios son), Observium, and LibreNMS. If you need only an SNMP monitoring system or you need real time graph Observium is your choice but Nagios is a complete solution.

The only advice is to be patient and creative because you can control everything you can need with Nagios.

The product for which Nagios was used to monitor was:

• Brightmail back-end 7/24 Operation
• Brightmail heuristics engine and development infrastructure

The ability to write your own plugins is the most valuable feature, but also it's nice that you can rudimentary monitoring primarily for Linux systems right out of the box.

We spend less time verifying that everything is up and running as Nagios does that for us leaving us time to do the other things. When something does break Nagios directed you quickly to the cause. With Nagios enabled, disruptions were less frequent and attended to more quickly.

Scaling Nagios to cover multiple regions or data-centers is challenging. It requires another tool which I never incorporated. Due to this gap I used a dedicated Nagios servers within each specific operation.

I've used Nagios since 2000. Before that it was called BigBrother and NetSaint which I hadn't used.

Implementation on Windows was painful. Also the use of NRPE can be problematic as its generally not inherent is OSes.

We have had no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

I didn't use customer service and technical support for Nagios. Everything I did I learned online through the extended community.

Prior to using Nagios for monitoring we had grown our own monitoring solution which latter became the company NOCpulse and was picked up by RedHat. Previous to that I used various other homegrown monitoring methods.

The initial setup is straightforward, but you need to have a good grasp of the underlying files structure. All the pieces are there but without this understanding where to put things is not entirely intuitive.

I always installed Nagios by myself. I never used a team. Advice I would have is you need management buy in. More than a few times I would implement this solution but without managements support it got little traction upfront. Meanwhile management pursued pricey solutions which were cumbersome and had long implementation cycles.

I can implement Nagios is a day for a medium sized (500 units) operation. Since the cost is zero and it can use a fairly cheap server to run on the ROI is nearly immediate.

Currently I use New Relic and Munin to track and maintain the operation I run. New Relic however isn't designed to alert like Nagios and they have told me as such.

Find a site where Nagios working and look at their implementation. Understand the file structure, dependencies and implementation. Start with the basics and add as needed. Identify what needs to be monitored and why.

Also, Nagios does not do trending/graphing well. I used the Nagios version of MRTG and it was pretty awful. I incorporated Cacti which partners well with Nagios. Without both tools you don't have a good understanding of how your operation is functioning.

Nagios can be installed on a server with very low specifications, our main server has 512 MB RAM and 1 processor.As the open source version does not provide a configuration interface, for those who need easy administration of Hosts and services - it can be integrated into other web applications such as NagiosQL (Personal favourite) with a database back-end to store configuration in the case of failure.There are many plugins we use on our desktops such as Nagstatus and Nagstatmon which provide us with real time monitoring results instead of sending out E-Mail alerts, Instant messages etc.We currently monitor all our servers using SNMP just to avoid installing apps like NSClient to keep monitoring simple and clean.

The Installation can get very difficult depending on what Linux flavour you are using. The open source version does not provide a configuration web interface. Some scripting knowledge is required in order to make changes to configuration files. Nagios is my favourite open source monitoring system. I just love it! It took me a while to properly configure Nagios to monitor our internal systems. Once we realised its potential we decided to setup remote polling on client systems, to have a central location for monitoring. (Using Centreon)As it is open source we were able to customise everything, from check commands, modifying the web interfaces, integrating into CMDBs such as iTop. When comparing Nagios to other monitoring systems it stands out by far.

If you are new to Nagios I recommend that you watch videos/read documentation before you start to mess around with the code. One little mistake can stop Nagios from monitoring your systems, so make sure that you always backup your configuration!

Nagios enables you to choose to have either a single server structure or multi server net. This helps you get the best optimization in a non-local datacenters, or remote servers on subnetworks.

I once worked on a project for a consortium in a mixed setting with Windows and Linux machines. We have integrated Nagios servers in each of the 120 head offices with different specifications. It is used for the monitoring of more than 1300 servers and 16000 clients with different sub-networks and many different applications in a closed environment. The servers of their head offices were configured to propagate the data to the primary Nagios server of the main control center, and to this mirror in the operative center and to the mirror it in the disaster recovery center.

They need to develop a better integration with a common ticketing system will be great. Once I built a complete integration with OTRS:ITSM and Nagios using the Samba LDAP database as the registry for user and machines in the software. It was a complex setup, but functional and could probably work in an Active Directory environment as well, but a fully-functional bidirectional bridge engine will be great. Nagios Enterprise has Nagios Incident Manager software but sometimes you need to work on preexisting systems with strong customizations.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Nagios is the best software of its kind if you have time for configure any host and network, and you can do quite everything with a bit of scripting. It is well documented, scalable and modular, as well as being good for a small business and for an enterprise environment. Take your time to study the product and test the agents first; be very careful on the traffic generated by agents and server-to-server communication.