Nagios Core vs. Splunk On-Call

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

I recommend Splunk on-call is more suited where there are high incident queues; multiple teams need to be involved in handling a P1 severity issue. Multiple levels of escalation are needed environment where automated action is required. I recommend the solution for large-scale & medium-scale business units. For small-scale business units, I see the functional value is less.

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

• Easily assign work/tickets between multiple users
• Supports a wide variety of software integrations
• Easy to manage scheduling tool
• As part of the Splunk toolset, provides detailed levels of data analysis at our engineers fingertips

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

• The user interface can be furthe improved
• Licensing needs to be simplified and packaged as a bundle with other Splunk product like Enterprise Security
• Customer outreach can be further enhanced

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 was a good solution with a good comprimise prize/features for our use cases

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

Good usability, it could be improved

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

VictorOps support has proven excellent for us. Because it is such a widely used tool, there is a lot of documentation on usage, and a large community of users to lean on. Also, many engineers have had experience working with VictorOps already, and the tool is so easy to setup / manage that much support isn't really necessary.

Incentivized

It was a good solution with a good comprimise prize/features for our use cases

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].

Splunk On-Call integrates better with our Splunk Cybersecurity and Reporting products due to the same family tree of the same eco system. We were previously using built-in on-call from individual applications and while adequate, they were difficult to manage and support SLA varied greatly across different applications. In addition we also used xMatters which did not integrate well with SAP products nor Citrix products so we were still using more than a single on-call product which was solved by implementing Splunk On-Call

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

• It runs our on call rotation so it makes it easy for us.
• It integrates with Slack so it makes it easy for us to manage through Slack.

Incentivized