N-able N-central vs. Nagios XI

N-Able is perfect for an MSP environment. It gives all the standard functionality an IT professional needs out of the box and can be configured to show almost anything required. For example, we have configured a dashboard to show when our backups need attention for each customer. This is achieved by running a small script on repeat via N-Central everyday/evening, and the result gives us information on the dashboard to help us identify exactly what is working and what needs looking into.

Incentivized

If anyone looking for the monitoring system for the infrastructure this is the go-to tool which monitors all infrastructure related components from server health to Networking and update us with mails and can be easily integrated with multiple other tools as needed for example PagerDuty , Also this suits good both on premises and cloud environments as well. If we are managing complex environment this tool for monitoring is best one.

Incentivized

• Remote tasks - entry-level techs can run basic tasks without physically touching a piece of equipment.
• Remote support - remote controlling user devices is easy and saves a lot of time with having to initiate a remote session.
• Management of devices, particularly patch management and anti-virus management - you can automatically approve and deploy patches and schedule automatic AV scans.

• Network monitoring.
• Database monitoring.
• Windows Server monitoring.
• Cluster Service monitoring.

Incentivized

• Customer support just points to online guides and I feel they aren't helpful.
• During the trial they turn on a lot of features. In my experience, if you play around with the features, they charge you for them. Keep this in mind if you move forward with N-Able - they will charge for "trialed" services.
• In my experience, some services that you're being charged for can't be disabled or monitored by you or your team. You only see them on the monthly invoice.
• In my opinion, the "Scripting Automation" doesn't provide value. You're either going to be writing your own batch or Powershell to make scripting work.
• In my opinion, monitoring software deployments is painful.
• The default monitoring template can't be duplicated, edited, or referenced. You'll find that the default monitors in an unusual way and will throw needless recurring alerts into your ticketing system. To avoid this, you need to create a template from scratch which takes many hours to set up.
• In my opinion, they're more concerned about a quick buck than customer service. "Buyer beware" company.

• Robust, but visually old interface. Requires a lot of work to become presentable.
• Small selection of dashlets to construct new views.
• No MS Azure monitoring ability, nothing for “as service,” very limited Amazon cloud monitoring abilities.
• Questionable price politics (could make it a lot less for developing markets to actually increase use of the product and R&D budgets).
• No report designers nor the ability to create new reports. No changes in this area for years.
• Overall lack of new developments, making this product more and more outdated.

Incentivized

Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.

Incentivized

This tool has been has been of great use and learning , offering exceptional ease of use, scalability, and detailed reporting. It has a lot of customization options and proactive monitoring which have significantly improved our infrastructure management.It's UI & functions are good. Also has built in templates for various end points.It also provides graphical reports. With a Dashboard you can monitor easily

Incentivized

The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.

Incentivized

We
are using Nagios XI in our organization primarily for monitoring all our
application servers and databases, this is helping us in addressing all the
infrastructure issues in advance by alerting us when it any server hits the
threshold as per the initial parameter setup also it has free tier which helps for small scale applications monitoring to save some expenses.

Incentivized

Never seen any such outages with Nagios XI till day it was available all the time working as expected

Incentivized

Performance wise it does its best job we monitor more than 500 Servers and we use this tool for Analysis also so never felt any lag

Incentivized

Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.

Incentivized

Nagios XI support has plans to offer the following features:

• Access to knowledgeable IT professionals – including support staff and developers.
• Access to customer-only tutorials, documentation, and content in the Nagios Library.
• Access to customer-only boards on our support forum for expedited assistance.
• Access to customer-only email support for fast, confidential assistance.
• Discounts on future license purchases.

Incentivized

Make sure if you your using a vm you follow the instructions for provisioning to the letter or it will be starting from square one

Incentivized

I have been participated in the few implementations, and I would say its bit complex when its come to initial setup once its set post that its easy to manage

Incentivized

Our version of SolarWinds was old and running on old hardware, but it was way easier to setup and do things with. It did not do everything N-able does such as patch management, or at least we didn't have a module to do so if one existed. However it definitely seemed easier to use and possibly more stable.

Cost efficiency is the main reason which we opted [for] Nagios as we were previously using IDERA tool with comprehensive database monitoring solutions, but the slow performance we are getting while monitoring the instance of the database.

Incentivized

We have installed Nagios XI for our monitoring system and with this we are managing around 600 servers in total and not seen any major issues with its scalability we can scale it as much as we require and also installed on various applications servers and working as expected

Incentivized

• We have lost hundreds of hours on the phone/emailing support with no resolution for any of our issues
• We had to move all of our services away which was very painful
• Staff satisfaction was low having to deal with this company

• Very good ROI.
• Good results as capacity mgmt tool.
• Good results as application monitoring tool.

Incentivized