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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WatchGuard XTM - Discontinued Product
Score 8.3 out of 10
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WatchGuard XTM is a firewall option, from WatchGuard Technologies.
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.
WatchGuard XTM comes in different models, so you can choose the model best suited for your company size. I think it works well in small as well as very large networks. I have not used this feature, but you can create a "FireCluster" to connect member devices of the same model if you need to put multiple WatchGuard XTMs in your environment. Coming from command line, it took a little adjusting to learn which screen to use to set up the different rules. Once you understand how to set up policies, it is simple to create more. New firewall administrators would appreciate the ease of creating policies, and expert administrators should find everything they need plus extra features.
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.
Support can be hard to work with. While they are typically knowledgeable, there can be a language barrier. Also, most troubleshooting seems intrusive which is a problem in a production environment.
The throughput of the cheaper models leaves something to be desired.
Have had some issues running VOIP behind these, but have not been able to narrow down the issues to the phone provider or WatchGuard yet.
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.
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].
Again, WatchGuard is priced much lower than other vendors in its space. It may not have some of the bigger features such as Layer 7 awareness. It's more simple to manage and provides IT staff the time to work on other tasks versus time spent to create complex rule sets.
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.
