Nagios Core vs. SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM)

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.

Incentivized

SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) is pretty good at forecasting capacity consumption, which was a must for us. If you have LUNs that have high latency in a normal environment (user shares, for instance), you'll need to customize the alerts to tune out the noise. As with all SW modules and most other products, there is a time lag between what is in the console and what's happening now. Data in the console and alerts are typically 5 to 15 minutes old.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Unmasks storage performance metrics and gives a common dashboard for monitoring.
• A simple, intuitive interface for adding supported storage frames.
• Lineage -- "The guest OS is connected to the virtual host and the virtual host is connected to the ... wait, what LUN is that?!?" #SOLVED.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Issues getting SMI working correctly to monitor Compellents through SRM.
• The ability to break down alerts to a more granular level.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It has helped me prove that we need more storage as well as faster storage to management

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Easy to set up and start. Out of the box alerts which you can tweak to your needs. Easy to use interfaces as well

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Do not have to contact support for issues often and when i do it is fast to get response and resolve my issues

Incentivized

Easy to use set up wizard went off without a hitch.

Incentivized

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].

We have a full suite of SolarWinds products and did not evaluate other options for a full package. For selective monitoring we log into the devices, but this has made that much easier as we have a dashboard rather than logging into devices one at a time.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Real-time monitoring and alerting to surpass those of native vSphere and in some occasions, better than manufacturer written software.
• Historical monitoring of environment with charts and graphs to assist with ever changing environment loads.

Incentivized