Grafana vs. Nagios Core

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Grafana
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$0
Nagios Core
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
Pricing
GrafanaNagios Core
Editions & Modules
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
Single License
Free
Single License
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GrafanaNagios Core
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GrafanaNagios Core
Considered Both Products
Grafana
Chose Grafana
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
Nagios Core
Chose Nagios Core
Nagios Core can do literally anything you need it to thanks to the amazing developer community and their ability to program custom addons. Need to monitor servers all over the world.The main advantage of Nagios Core is that it allows you to be aware of the status of each host …
Features
GrafanaNagios Core
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.2
7 Ratings
0% above category average
Nagios Core
-
Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports7.77 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards8.67 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.37 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
7.9
6 Ratings
1% below category average
Nagios Core
-
Ratings
Drill-down analysis7.76 Ratings00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.36 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages7.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.05 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.4
6 Ratings
1% above category average
Nagios Core
-
Ratings
Publish to Web8.16 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.76 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Versioning8.36 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers8.76 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.5
6 Ratings
7% above category average
Nagios Core
-
Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.66 Ratings00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.06 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics8.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining8.14 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaNagios Core
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.9 out of 10
Veeam ONE
Veeam ONE
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.9 out of 10
Icinga
Icinga
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 8.5 out of 10
ScienceLogic SL1
ScienceLogic SL1
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GrafanaNagios Core
Likelihood to Recommend
9.4
(7 ratings)
8.5
(44 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.9
(3 ratings)
Usability
9.7
(3 ratings)
4.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.7
(9 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaNagios Core
Likelihood to Recommend
Grafana Labs
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
Nagios monitoring is well suited for any mission critical application that requires per/second (or minute) monitoring. This would probably include even a shuttle launch. As Nagios was built around Linux, most (85%) plugins are Linux based, therefore its more suitable for a Linux environment.
As Nagios (and dependent components) requires complex configurations & compilations, an experienced Linux engineer would be needed to install all relevant components.
Any company that has hundreds (or thousands) of servers & services to monitor would require a stable monitoring solution like Nagios. I have seen Nagios used in extremely mediocre ways, but the core power lies when its fully configured with all remaining open-source components (i.e. MySQL, Grafana, NRDP etc). Nagios in the hands of an experienced Linux engineer can transform the organizations monitoring by taking preventative measures before a disaster strikes.
Read full review
Pros
Grafana Labs
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
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Nagios Enterprises
  • Monitoring of services is one of the biggest benefits for our company. Being able to respond in a timely fashion keeps business smooth.
  • Hardware and device monitoring are easy to set up with proper parameters.
  • Notification to key staff to be able to respond quickly makes issues go away faster.
Read full review
Cons
Grafana Labs
  • There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
  • We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
  • In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Nagios Enterprises
We're currently looking to combine a bunch of our network montioring solutions into a single platform. Running multiple unique solutions for monitoring, data collection, compliance reporting etc has become a lot to manage.
Read full review
Usability
Grafana Labs
It is infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources
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Nagios Enterprises
The Nagios UI is in need of a complete overhaul. Nice graphics and trendy fonts are easy on the eyes, but the menu system is dated, the lack of built in graphing support is confusing, and the learning curve for a new user is too steep.
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Support Rating
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Nagios Enterprises
I haven't had to use support very often, but when I have, it has been effective in helping to accomplish our goals. Since Nagios has been very popular for a long time, there is also a very large user base from which to learn from and help you get your questions answered.
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Alternatives Considered
Grafana Labs
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
Because we get all we required in Nagios [Core] and for npm, we have to do lots of configuration as it is not as easy as Comair to Nagios [Core]. On npm UI, there is lots of data, so we are not able to track exact data for analysis, which is why we use Nagios [Core].
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Return on Investment
Grafana Labs
  • Grafana has replaced many higher priced tools
  • The integrations are seemless with multiple backends
  • Combining graphs and dashboards from multiple data sources is a game changer
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Nagios Enterprises
  • With it being a free tool, there is no cost associated with it, so it's very valuable to an organization to get something that is so great and widely used for free.
  • You can set up as many alerts as you want without incurring any fees.
Read full review
ScreenShots