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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PagerDuty
Score 8.6 out of 10
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PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) provides digital operations management. Serving organizations of all sizes, PagerDuty aims to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers, every time.
Nagios was the best in the past and why I chose it for many of the companies I've worked for. Also, coming in to a company, there is almost always a Nagios server installed and since everyone knows the software it's easy to write plugins for it. But, in 2015, Nagios is a …
VictorOps was ok. PagerDuty allowed more flexibility in scheduling from what I recall. I wasn't involved with the decision making but in our testing VictorOps wasn't as comfortable to use as PagerDuty.
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.
PagerDuty is well-suited for teams or companies that need immediate response, such as production outages, server downtime, failed deployments, API failures, or critical infrastructure alerts. For example, if any company is doing work that requires immediate attention to any problem that arises due to a delay, it means the company loses money; PagerDuty would be the best fit for that company.
PagerDuty feels like something you can absolutely rely on... because in the rarest case where an alert is not acknowledged by the relevant agent, the alert automatically is escalated to our TL, which saves any possible errors or misses.
In terms of integration, I would rate it a 9.4 as it's absolutely seamless with Microsoft Teams or emails, ultimately resulting in a reduction of errors in work, which I greatly appreciate about PagerDuty.
In some cases, when an account requires input from multiple agents, PagerDuty makes sure to notify each of the relevant ones.
Other than this, sometimes when we have new joinings, it becomes easy for us to train them because every alert or response is recorded or logged. Because of this feature, we are able to check our past actions as well, so that a good feature about PagerDuty.
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.
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.
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.
The UI is more complex than I would like. Part of the challenge is that most users use PagerDuty infrequently; I don't remember how I changed a policy last time. Another part of the challenge is that some users expect alerting to be a trivial feature, and are reluctant to invest any time in reading the documentation.
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.
PagerDuty is reliable and easy to set up. It gives an effective way to notify the team about critical incidents which results in a faster turnaround time on issues. users can customize their alerts rules based on their preferences. Overall it's effective and easy to use which adds great business value.
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].
I have not use the 2 technologies for as long as I have used PagerDuty but in my opinion PagerDuty makes things a lot easier. The other tools got the job done and got alerts out but PagerDuty just seemed to make the setup for on-call alert schedules and integrations easier than the others. This isn't to say the others are difficult, just that PagerDuty was slightly better. I also have noticed that more tools have options to integrate to PagerDuty over the other tools.
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.