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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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Score 8.8 out of 10
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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is network diagnostics and troubleshooting technology, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
We evaluated PRTG Network Monitor which was similar to SolarWinds but was very resource-intensive and the server kept crashing when we got close to 100 devices
whereas on SolarWinds we were able to add several thousand devices. We
also evaluated Nagios Core as a free …
All of the SolarWinds solutions stack up against their competition. The customer support is excellent, KB articles are details, and the community (Thwack) is the best when it comes to working through complex configurations/monitors. These are the things that make them the right …
Prior to using SolarWinds NCM, we did not have anything like this in place, which meant we were very vulnerable. Peace of mind is gained from using SolarWinds Orion products.
For the last 8 years, SolarWinds has been our solution in network management and monitoring. We run Network Performance Monitor, NetFlow Analyzer and Engineers Toolset. We evaluated WhatsUp Gold, ManageEngine and Service Desk. We use Nagios for our alerting system and Service …
SolarWinds NCM is easier to use, has a larger knowledge base, and is more easily configured than other competitors I have tried. With time being extremely important to everyone, not having to worry about these CI's makes implementation and maintenance much easier.
Intermapper is a fine product but one that we felt that we outgrew.
It is a very reliable product that we have used for many years and provides excellent status and alerting but it is lacking in many of the features that SolarWinds is capable of providing. It's a simplistic …
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.
If your IT team isn't proficient in automation and scripting, Solarwinds NCM can fill that gap (assuming your company's security team signs off on approving SW in your environment given the hack.) Basic device configuration, pushing mass changes reliably and backups are NCM's strong suites. If you have a complex scenario where if/then cases are needed, NCM is a bit lack luster. Auto discovery isn't as easy either as certain parameters need to be met for that feature to work 100% of the time
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.
For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline.
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.
Medium complexity to set up in the beginning if using any non-standard devices or configurations, else fairly easy (e.g. Cisco Nexus or IOS-based devices). Reports are fairly straightforward to set up. Updates to the platform are fairly straightforward and don't take a major effort. Easy to add or remove devices.
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 user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.
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.
To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.
Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it
it was a fairly easy implementation and everything was pretty straightforward. only challenge we had was getting all the snmp communities updated on the networking equipment
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].
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a great tool and matches much of the functionality of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager. Nothing about Ansible will likely be overwhelming to an engineer with a little time to spare, but that spare time combined with SolarWinds already being our monitoring tool made the decision easy. Time is at a premium in small teams and SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is very easy to use right out of the box without all the tweaking required by powerful command line driven tools like Ansible.
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.
