Overall Satisfaction with Nagios
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.