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In our organization, we use Nagios Core to monitor servers and applications for our clients. We also use it to monitor our and our …
Overview
What is Nagios Core?
Nagios provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components. Multiple APIs and community-build add-ons enable integration and monitoring with in-house and third-party applications for optimized scaling.
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Pricing
Single License
Free
On Premise
Single License
Free
Cloud
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.nagios.com/products/nagios…
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
nagios core
YouTube
Nagios Exploit DEMO - Remote CodeExec CVE-2016-9565 & Root PrivEsc CVE-2016-9566
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Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Nagios Core?
Nagios provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Multiple APIs provide for simple integration with in-house and third-party applications. Thousands of community-developed add-ons extend monitoring and native alerting functionality. Third-party add-ons are available for monitoring in-house applications, services, and systems.
The vendor says Nagios is the industry standard In IT Infrastructure Monitoring. The vendor says the powerful Nagios Core 4 monitoring engine provides a high level of performance, and that its high-efficiency worker processes allow for scalability and monitoring effectiveness. It is designed to provide a central view of a company's entire IT operations network and business processes. Multi-user access to web interface allows stakeholders to view relevant infrastructure status. User-specific views ensures clients only see the infrastructure components they’re authorized for.
The vendor says Nagios is the industry standard In IT Infrastructure Monitoring. The vendor says the powerful Nagios Core 4 monitoring engine provides a high level of performance, and that its high-efficiency worker processes allow for scalability and monitoring effectiveness. It is designed to provide a central view of a company's entire IT operations network and business processes. Multi-user access to web interface allows stakeholders to view relevant infrastructure status. User-specific views ensures clients only see the infrastructure components they’re authorized for.
Nagios Core Features
- Supported: Advanced Graphs & Visualizations
- Supported: Performance & Capacity Planning Graphs
- Supported: Configuration Wizards
- Supported: Advanced Infrastructure Management
- Supported: Configuration Snapshot Archive
- Supported: Advanced User Management
- Supported: Service-Level Agreement (SLA) Reports
- Supported: Extendable Architecture
Nagios Core Integrations
- Sematext Infrastructure Monitoring module
- among others
Nagios Core Competitors
Nagios Core Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android |
| Supported Countries | Global |
| Supported Languages | English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, French, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Polish |
Frequently Asked Questions
Nagios provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components. Multiple APIs and community-build add-ons enable integration and monitoring with in-house and third-party applications for optimized scaling.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM), and N-able Risk Intelligence are common alternatives for Nagios Core.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 7.7.
The most common users of Nagios Core are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
Nagios, a popular IT infrastructure monitoring tool, has proven to be a valuable asset for organizations across various departments. With its robust monitoring capabilities and ease of setup, Nagios has become a go-to solution for many users. Users have found Nagios useful for a wide range of use cases, including monitoring applications and computing resources, gaining insights through reporting features, and proactively detecting potential issues. Nagios' ability to handle a large number of servers and services without stability issues has been commended by users. It also offers hassle-free implementation of plugins behind firewalls, supporting both Pull and Push Monitoring methods. The customization options in Nagios allow users to create plugins in various programming languages, making it adaptable to their specific needs. Integration with other technologies like MySQL, NRDP, Pnp4Nagios, and Grafana further enhances its functionality. For example, Nagios can be integrated with MySQL for storage and retrieval, NRDP for push alerting, Pnp4Nagios for RRD graphing, and Grafana for aggregated graphing, dashboards, heat-maps, and alerts.
Nagios plays a vital role in monitoring infrastructure for multiple departments within organizations. It is widely used by network operations teams to monitor infrastructure 24/7 and configure alerts for application status. Users have also found Nagios instrumental in identifying bottlenecks and patching issues during the testing phase. With its ability to monitor a diverse range of server operating systems and components like disk space, CPU and memory utilization, network availability, Kerberos replication, Active Directory, Novell NDS driver monitoring, among others; Nagios provides comprehensive coverage for system monitoring needs. It saves time by automating server space checks and sending real-time information to the IT team. Additionally, Nagios proves its worth in data centers by issuing early alerts on sensitive equipment such as servers, switches, routers, firewalls, and air conditioners. The tool is also used by various departments like Data Center Operations, Provisioning, Operations, Infrastructure, and Enterprise Monitoring to ensure the health and performance of their respective areas. Overall, Nagios stands out as an excellent open-source monitoring tool with a large community of users and scripts available for monitoring diverse applications, servers, websites, and services.
Flexibility and Configurability: Many users have praised Nagios for its extreme flexibility and configurability. They appreciate the ability to customize the monitoring according to their specific needs, including agent and agentless monitoring solutions with a variety of plugins.
Intuitive User Interface: The simplicity and ease of use of Nagios' user interface are highly praised by users. They mention that the interface is intuitive and easy to read, allowing them to quickly understand the monitoring status and identify any issues.
Extensibility through Plugins: The extensibility of Nagios through plugins, scripts, and customizations is highly valued by users. They mention that they have been able to add any needed functionality using plugins and scripts, making Nagios more flexible than other monitoring systems.
Dated and Unattractive User Interface: Several users have criticized Nagios for its dated and unattractive user interface, which they find less appealing. The interface is in need of a major overhaul to improve usability and streamline the experience. Some users have suggested improvements to make it less confusing and easier to navigate.
Reliance on Community-Driven Plugins: Users have expressed frustration with the reliance on open source community-driven plugins for third-party applications and hardware support in Nagios. This can lead to unpolished or broken plugins, requiring additional time to configure. Configuring and deploying these plugins was troublesome for some users, requiring patience to connect all the various components.
Steep Learning Curve: The learning curve for Nagios can be steep, especially for those not familiar with Linux. The configuration process can be messy and prone to accidental breakage, making it challenging for new users. Additionally, some background knowledge of Linux is required during the initial configuration process.
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Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
October 21, 2019
Simple to use - good value for your money
Device availability (Uptime/Downtime) both real time and overtime, SNMP monitoring (CPU utilization, memory, temperature, fan status, disk capacity, etc.), latency tests.
- SNMP Monitoring
- Intuitive and simple-to-use interface
- Great cost-value balance
- Fault tolerance (redundancy)
- Not so easy to restore information
- Much better network device performance metrics allowing to troubleshoot and do before/after changes comparisons
- Has helped us to integrate with our Service Management tool (through other 3rd party tools)
- Important part of our overall network health dashboard providing granular details at the device level (not end-to-end performance)
- Cost is very convenient
The cost is considerably better. Others are probably more complete and even overkilled if all you're looking for is simple SNMP alerting and reporting. If you're looking for integrated analytics or more complex reporting/alerting, there might be better options. Nagios also provides basic NetFlow monitoring in a separate module (also purchased separately) but I don't believe it's all that intuitive and might require additional efforts to set it up compared to other NetFlow tools.
March 15, 2019
Nagios - Open Source Network Monitoring
Nagios is being used to monitor and report on the utilization of some of our network hardware. It's primary use is restricted to our IT department, with a couple of additional users. We use it to monitor switch status, and mated with MRTG Nagios gives us bandwidth detail on a per port basis.
- Up/Down Alerting.
- Monitoring of supported applications (SQL, Exchange, etc).
- Upon an alert, Nagios' ability to fire off scripts allows us to either fix problems automatically or gather data about an issue as soon as it happens.
- Support for third party applications and hardware relies heavily on open source community driven plugins. Deploying new platforms to Nagios can be a bit of a job because of this, often plugins are unpolished, undocumented or outright broken. You have to be willing to spend some time tweaking to make this worth while.
- The Nagios UI is not the best. Even with the new update, it's still quite evident that it's an updated version of an old system. While it's hard to re-arrange a tool like this, there comes a time when a UI overhaul is just what you have to do.
- Nagios was quite obviously built to focus on alerting and event management. Attempting to use it also as a data collection tool can be frustrating and require a lot of plugins.
- I know when I've got an outage before the phone rings. We often have dispatched techs and are working to resolve our issues long before our customers notice.
- Nagios allows us to plan for future bottlenecks, there is very little reason to ever be surprised by a utilization issue.
- Nagios has cost us heavily in man hours to get running and comfortable. However cost on back of man hours is better than live environment outages any day.
- Zabbix and Spiceworks
We selected Nagios because of the size of its community. We've used some of the others in the field over the past few years, Nagios had the best features out of the box coupled with it's following made it an easy selection.
7
Network Administrator
Systems Administrator
Phone Administrator
NOC Crew
Tier 1 and 2 support
2
Our systems admin handles the support of the Nagios platform, and we have an inhouse coder that works to make downloaded plugins fit our needs and when required writes custom code.
- Up/Down Alerting
- Resource Management
- Uptime calculation
- Resource Utilization predictions
- By following strings of alerts as a failure happens we can easily identify the location of an outage and in moments get an idea of services effected.
- We're really hoping to see Nagios catch up to some of our competitors in reporting and data collection.
No
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
Price is always a concern, however when dealing with network monitoring and alerting, functionality needs to be at the top of the list. Nagios is a stable platform, with fantastic redundancy options. Nagios is at the top of their game.
With all the monitoring systems we evaluated, I don't think I spent enough time focused on importing data and customizing alerts. Instead of loading a couple of machines and doing some simple testing, I would have loaded our whole environment and attempted to use the solution in a real world scenario for a month. There have been a lot of customization related questions that came out after installation that could have been answered in the evaluation period.
- Monitoring a supported platform is extremely easy to set up.
- Setting up email alerting works exactly as it should.
- Finding possible solutions in the community plugins is easy, however sometimes the configuration isn't so well documented.
- Configuration in Nagios relies heavily on text files.
- Graphing data is not supported out of the box, it requires additional plugins that can be complex to integrate.
March 15, 2019
Nagios: DIY Full Stack Monitoring
We use Nagios to monitor our servers to make sure they are online and healthy. We use it in addition to third-party monitoring services so we have redundancy in monitoring. Nagios tells us if the host is up or not and if any of its services are struggling. The ability to monitor services is nice because it gives us an early warning and we can fix problems before they become critical. We are using Nagios to monitor basic services like web servers and databases.
- It can monitor just about anything because of its extensive plugin directory.
- It's free, so it is a great solution if you are on a limited budget.
- It can be customized any way you'd like, so you have complete control over the delivery and presentation of notifications.
- It's built by engineers for engineers so setting it up and configuring it is relatively complicated. It could really use a simplified configuration approach, or a GUI to set it up instead of editing config files.
- I'd like to see the option to have service notification settings inherited from the host setting notifications. They have to be set up separately but they are often the same, so it would be nice to have less redundancy.
- Positive: Nagios has saved us money.
- Positive: Nagios has given us early warning of systems in trouble and we were able to fix them before it got worse.
- Negative: The amount of time spent configuring it was more than I'd like. We take a "set it and forget it" approach to Nagios, so when it needs tuning we have to familiarize ourselves with the configuration.
October 02, 2017
Nagios - first in flexibility
Nagios benefits the whole organization but is configured and operated by our IT systems administrators only. We find the configuration of Nagios to be relatively difficult to understand (steeper learning curve) but once you know it you know how it works well. Most of our Nagios installations involve flat-file configuration which is the out of box experience with Nagios. We have one installation of Nagios XI and while that is more user friendly, we simply chose not to make all installations an XI installation for license reasons.
Nagios handles the majority of our monitoring and we use a third party service for alerting (though the alerts originate from Nagios, or a different monitoring source). Specifically, we use Nagios for the following types of alerts: 1) Scripted custom checks 2) system cpu, memory, and disk space 3) Dell OMSA checks (hardware) 4) database monitoring 5) esxi monitoring. Admittedly this is just scratching the surface for Nagios uses. I hope to integrate more SNMP monitors for hardware devices including UPS and our firewalls.
Nagios handles the majority of our monitoring and we use a third party service for alerting (though the alerts originate from Nagios, or a different monitoring source). Specifically, we use Nagios for the following types of alerts: 1) Scripted custom checks 2) system cpu, memory, and disk space 3) Dell OMSA checks (hardware) 4) database monitoring 5) esxi monitoring. Admittedly this is just scratching the surface for Nagios uses. I hope to integrate more SNMP monitors for hardware devices including UPS and our firewalls.
- Nagios has never crashed, so it is rock solid stable.
- Standardization in the plugins makes it easy to rely on them.
- The web interface is simple enough anyone can work in it. So, sharing the monitored results are relatively easy too.
- Really, when compared to most other monitoring solutions, Nagios feels less flashy, and does less for you. It's strengths are in its configuration flexibility and that its rock solid daemon.
- Nagios could use core improvements in HA, though, Nagios itself recommends monitoring itself with just another Nagios installation, which has worked fine for us. Given its stability, and this work-around, a minor need.
- Nagios could also use improvements, feature wise, to the web gui. There is a lot in Nagios XI which I felt were almost excluded intentionally from the core project. Given the core functionality, a minor need. We have moved admin facing alerts to appear as though they originate from a different service to make interacting with alerts more practical.
- Nagios has had a great ROI, as we have only invested a medium amount of time into learning the solution and it has given us essentially free monitoring since. We did take some time to write some assisting code... which can be argued to have diminished ROI. But, that code is now permanently with us and should last many versions of Nagios and its host OS.
Nagios is more configurable than competitors and we originally wanted something we could spin up quick for some simple checks. As our needs grew, our understanding and use of Nagios grew, and it was a natural choice. Having personally used other monitoring solutions, I prefer Nagios for its flexibility.
July 24, 2017
Why, why the hell I chose Nagios
We are using Nagios to monitor systems and services upon which we receive regular emails with statistics to measure KPI. Furthermore, we have already established a ground rule to have everything monitored, including the test systems and test services as well. Luckily, during the test period, we could identify bottlenecks and patch sooner rather than later using statistics and notifications from Nagios.
- Regular checks - never miss a lost service
- Statistics report - crucial to measure KPI
- Notifications - get instant calls about incidents to prevent issues
- Add users/services: it is sometimes difficult to add new users and services, but that is only because we haven't purchased a GUI to edit these.
- Difficult to connect to: since it is difficult to add new users, there is no interface and we have to opt for a third-party GUI
- No GUI: we have to opt for a third-party GUI to have a better visualization
- Services are stable and monitored.
- We do not have to check systems occasionally if there is a problem.
- It's easy to deploy so does not take lots of time to configure it initially.
- Cheaper and definitely easier to set up.
- Kind of difficult to fully configure, but once Nagios is configured - you really do not need to check back if everything is still working.
- Operations Manager needs to be monitored as well, so you need a monitoring service for the monitoring server, and that is not convenient at all.