Nagios Core vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Nagios Core
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds LEM is security information and event management (SIEM) software.N/A
Pricing
Nagios CoreSolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Editions & Modules
Single License
Free
Single License
Free
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Nagios CoreSolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Nagios CoreSolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Considered Both Products
Nagios Core
Chose Nagios Core
Nagios is an easy to use intuative tool that gives a great return on investment. It has better monitoring features that IT needs than competitors and won't break the bank. Support for this tool is first class and the techs will help you to get the most out of the product.
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Nagios CoreSolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
Comparison of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) features of Product A and Product B
Nagios Core
-
Ratings
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
7.7
17 Ratings
1% below category average
Centralized event and log data collection00 Ratings8.517 Ratings
Correlation00 Ratings7.614 Ratings
Event and log normalization/management00 Ratings7.317 Ratings
Deployment flexibility00 Ratings7.917 Ratings
Integration with Identity and Access Management Tools00 Ratings7.912 Ratings
Custom dashboards and workspaces00 Ratings4.916 Ratings
Host and network-based intrusion detection00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Nagios CoreSolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Small Businesses
Pulseway
Pulseway
Score 8.9 out of 10
AlienVault USM
AlienVault USM
Score 8.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
Splunk Enterprise
Splunk Enterprise
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
Splunk Enterprise
Splunk Enterprise
Score 8.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Nagios CoreSolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Likelihood to Recommend
7.7
(42 ratings)
8.2
(45 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.9
(3 ratings)
7.3
(2 ratings)
Usability
4.0
(1 ratings)
6.7
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
7.7
(9 ratings)
7.5
(17 ratings)
User Testimonials
Nagios CoreSolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Likelihood to Recommend
Nagios Enterprises
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.
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SolarWinds
Solarwinds SEM is great for generating reports for investigation purposes. Once you set up the connectors you can walk away and the product runs without needing maintenance. It was however pretty difficult to create the reports and alerts when now starting out and it can be very intimidating for new users.
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Pros
Nagios Enterprises
  • 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.
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SolarWinds
  • It does a great job of notifying us when accounts have been locked out. We can then find out the device on the network where the login attempt occurred.
  • Searching for incidents is now a lot faster with the implementation of the HTML 5 interface.
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Cons
Nagios Enterprises
  • 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.
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SolarWinds
  • All SolarWinds product suffer from slow response times in management portals. SolarWinds SEM is no exception. While it is much preferred over a "thick client" there is much room for improvement in speed.
  • If you use the email alert features with SolarWinds make sure to prepare you staff and team for the large amount of emails they could receive. Make sure to reduce the number of alerts so your team does not ignore the alerts.
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Likelihood to Renew
Nagios Enterprises
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.
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SolarWinds
It is pretty likely that we will renew SEM when the time comes up. It is easy to use and maintain so there isn't much of a need to replace this product. It is also a pretty fair price for the capabilities provided by the SEM
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Usability
Nagios Enterprises
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.
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SolarWinds
If you are familiar with SolarWinds then you can use this product it's as easy as that. If you have never used a SolarWinds product then it will take a minute to get how they do reports and make dashboards but that being said the tool is great and can make things very easy once you get a feel for how it works and get everything setup how you like it.
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Support Rating
Nagios Enterprises
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.
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SolarWinds
The quality of support can vary depending on whom you end up speaking with. I was fortunate enough to work with a support representative who was very familiar with the product. He had even authored some of the support documentation on the website. On the flip side, I had two other experiences where I was simply directed to online training material.
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Alternatives Considered
Nagios Enterprises
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].
Read full review
SolarWinds
Splunk was a pretty good product but the licensing structure needed a lot of work. They changed the structure three times that I am aware and I still had problems understanding LogRhythm had a lot of issues correlating users to IP addresses, the mappings were frequently wrong so this product could not be trusted in my environment as all our access logs are IP based and this needs to be matched to usernames from AD Fortianalzyer is a great product but it can only do logs from Fortigates so that was not helping for anything other than our firewalls.
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Return on Investment
Nagios Enterprises
  • 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.
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SolarWinds
  • For the price, it produced a decent value. It did a lot of the easy stuff well. I can't give any specific data given the objective of the product was to monitor very basic events in the environment.
  • There are free options that can do a better job.
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ScreenShots

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Screenshots

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