Nagios Core vs PingPlotter

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.

It's a great diagnostic tool. It isn't really this useful in our company for continuous monitoring because we don't have a giant network infrastructure but it sure is handy at times. It wasn't that hard to learn how to use PingPlotter and I believe it saved us a lot of time during troubleshooting. The price is alright compared to alternatives and I believe that it was a really great purchase for our company. It isn't appropriate if your network infrastructure is really small or limited just because you will find yourself missing out on a lot of features that you're paying for but not actually using. They are alternatives with fewer features for cheaper. For our company, PingPlotter is definitely a great tool.

• 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.

• Plotting pings over long periods of time.
• Visually displaying metrics such as uptime, packet loss and response times.
• It has an easy to use console.

• 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.

• Graphical highlight for Latency is limited to just one section of the GUI
• Share report could include more than just a screenshot (i.e. drill down interactive)
• Knowledge Base could use more videos versus just text articles

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.

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.

I have not had much contact with the PingPlotter support, only one time have I went to them and it was a positive experience. The questions I had were answered quickly and professionally. I have no issue with the experience I had with the Support team. This was from before and after the purchase of the product.

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].

A balance of a generic tool vs a network equipment product is necessary when investigating network incidents or disruptions. Need to train the engineer to use both tools to perform their analysis and to dive down to the issues as fast as they can. Experience with the tools will continue to play a part if we were to adopt PingPlotter

• 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.

• It is time-saving and works as a guardian angel for us in times of trouble.
• We are able to look for and resolve the network’s internal issues.
• The time we spent on troubleshooting has lessened.