Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Nagios Core

Nagios Core

Overview

What is Nagios Core?

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.

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Nagios, a popular IT infrastructure monitoring tool, has proven to be a valuable asset for organizations across various departments. With …
Continue reading

Nagios for the win

6 out of 10
May 17, 2021
Incentivized
We use Nagios as our alternative Network Monitoring Software for our data centers and out branches. It helps you monitor branch with down …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

Single License

Free

On Premise

Single License

Free

Cloud

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.nagios.com/products/nagios…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Return to navigation

Product Demos

nagios core

YouTube

Nagios Exploit DEMO - Remote CodeExec CVE-2016-9565 & Root PrivEsc CVE-2016-9566

YouTube
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is Nagios Core?

Nagios provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Multiple APIs provide for simple integration with in-house and third-party applications. Thousands of community-developed add-ons extend monitoring and native alerting functionality. Third-party add-ons are available for monitoring in-house applications, services, and systems.

The vendor says Nagios is the industry standard In IT Infrastructure Monitoring. The vendor says the powerful Nagios Core 4 monitoring engine provides a high level of performance, and that its high-efficiency worker processes allow for scalability and monitoring effectiveness. It is designed to provide a central view of a company's entire IT operations network and business processes. Multi-user access to web interface allows stakeholders to view relevant infrastructure status. User-specific views ensures clients only see the infrastructure components they’re authorized for.

Nagios Core Features

  • Supported: Advanced Graphs & Visualizations
  • Supported: Performance & Capacity Planning Graphs
  • Supported: Configuration Wizards
  • Supported: Advanced Infrastructure Management
  • Supported: Configuration Snapshot Archive
  • Supported: Advanced User Management
  • Supported: Service-Level Agreement (SLA) Reports
  • Supported: Extendable Architecture

Nagios Core Integrations

Nagios Core Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android
Supported CountriesGlobal
Supported LanguagesEnglish, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, French, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Polish

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 7.7.

The most common users of Nagios Core are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(164)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Nagios, a popular IT infrastructure monitoring tool, has proven to be a valuable asset for organizations across various departments. With its robust monitoring capabilities and ease of setup, Nagios has become a go-to solution for many users. Users have found Nagios useful for a wide range of use cases, including monitoring applications and computing resources, gaining insights through reporting features, and proactively detecting potential issues. Nagios' ability to handle a large number of servers and services without stability issues has been commended by users. It also offers hassle-free implementation of plugins behind firewalls, supporting both Pull and Push Monitoring methods. The customization options in Nagios allow users to create plugins in various programming languages, making it adaptable to their specific needs. Integration with other technologies like MySQL, NRDP, Pnp4Nagios, and Grafana further enhances its functionality. For example, Nagios can be integrated with MySQL for storage and retrieval, NRDP for push alerting, Pnp4Nagios for RRD graphing, and Grafana for aggregated graphing, dashboards, heat-maps, and alerts.

Nagios plays a vital role in monitoring infrastructure for multiple departments within organizations. It is widely used by network operations teams to monitor infrastructure 24/7 and configure alerts for application status. Users have also found Nagios instrumental in identifying bottlenecks and patching issues during the testing phase. With its ability to monitor a diverse range of server operating systems and components like disk space, CPU and memory utilization, network availability, Kerberos replication, Active Directory, Novell NDS driver monitoring, among others; Nagios provides comprehensive coverage for system monitoring needs. It saves time by automating server space checks and sending real-time information to the IT team. Additionally, Nagios proves its worth in data centers by issuing early alerts on sensitive equipment such as servers, switches, routers, firewalls, and air conditioners. The tool is also used by various departments like Data Center Operations, Provisioning, Operations, Infrastructure, and Enterprise Monitoring to ensure the health and performance of their respective areas. Overall, Nagios stands out as an excellent open-source monitoring tool with a large community of users and scripts available for monitoring diverse applications, servers, websites, and services.

Flexibility and Configurability: Many users have praised Nagios for its extreme flexibility and configurability. They appreciate the ability to customize the monitoring according to their specific needs, including agent and agentless monitoring solutions with a variety of plugins.

Intuitive User Interface: The simplicity and ease of use of Nagios' user interface are highly praised by users. They mention that the interface is intuitive and easy to read, allowing them to quickly understand the monitoring status and identify any issues.

Extensibility through Plugins: The extensibility of Nagios through plugins, scripts, and customizations is highly valued by users. They mention that they have been able to add any needed functionality using plugins and scripts, making Nagios more flexible than other monitoring systems.

Dated and Unattractive User Interface: Several users have criticized Nagios for its dated and unattractive user interface, which they find less appealing. The interface is in need of a major overhaul to improve usability and streamline the experience. Some users have suggested improvements to make it less confusing and easier to navigate.

Reliance on Community-Driven Plugins: Users have expressed frustration with the reliance on open source community-driven plugins for third-party applications and hardware support in Nagios. This can lead to unpolished or broken plugins, requiring additional time to configure. Configuring and deploying these plugins was troublesome for some users, requiring patience to connect all the various components.

Steep Learning Curve: The learning curve for Nagios can be steep, especially for those not familiar with Linux. The configuration process can be messy and prone to accidental breakage, making it challenging for new users. Additionally, some background knowledge of Linux is required during the initial configuration process.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-42 of 42)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nagios in our Organization for network monitoring. It addresses the network status from Google to ISP, each LAN, and some servers.
  • Nagios network monitoring tool help us to know the status of the Internet service. We can easily identify from where the Internet service stop.
  • Nagios reduces the effort of NW team here in our organization. The NW team first task is checking Nagios. Is the whole NW is working? which one is fail? By checking Nagios the NW team can easily manage the failing LAN.
  • In our organization there are some server. We can easily their status by using Nagios.
  • Nagios to be the first network monitoring tool it needs additional improvements, like the speed of connection.
Nagios is the most significant and well suited network tool for all organizations.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios benefits the whole organization but is configured and operated by our IT systems administrators only. We find the configuration of Nagios to be relatively difficult to understand (steeper learning curve) but once you know it you know how it works well. Most of our Nagios installations involve flat-file configuration which is the out of box experience with Nagios. We have one installation of Nagios XI and while that is more user friendly, we simply chose not to make all installations an XI installation for license reasons.

Nagios handles the majority of our monitoring and we use a third party service for alerting (though the alerts originate from Nagios, or a different monitoring source). Specifically, we use Nagios for the following types of alerts: 1) Scripted custom checks 2) system cpu, memory, and disk space 3) Dell OMSA checks (hardware) 4) database monitoring 5) esxi monitoring. Admittedly this is just scratching the surface for Nagios uses. I hope to integrate more SNMP monitors for hardware devices including UPS and our firewalls.
  • Nagios has never crashed, so it is rock solid stable.
  • Standardization in the plugins makes it easy to rely on them.
  • The web interface is simple enough anyone can work in it. So, sharing the monitored results are relatively easy too.
  • Really, when compared to most other monitoring solutions, Nagios feels less flashy, and does less for you. It's strengths are in its configuration flexibility and that its rock solid daemon.
  • 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.
Nagios is simply a very configurable and rock solid monitoring engine. For these reasons I would recommend it to any IT professional in any medium to large organization where creating custom checks and programming ones custom needs into the configuration is practical. I would be more hesitant to recommend it as a first monitoring solution for a small business which is usually accompanied by a less experienced and/or more time constrained admin.
David Mathis II | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use Nagios in our operations department to monitor the health of our internal tooling and customer facing products.
  • Connectivity checks in nagios are simple and impactful. Having a ping check on every host should be step one in any Nagios deployment.
  • The plugin network for Nagios is huge, and very extensible. Chances are someone has already wrote and shared a plugin that does exactly what you need. But if not, you can write your own.
  • With features like remote plugin executor (NRPE) you can do remote checks (pull style) instead of push. Having the option to do both is great.
  • The Nagios web interface is not the prettiest, and stays fairly stagnant behind more modern approaches to displaying information.
  • The ability to add service comments is a nice feature but the fact you must often manually delete them is annoying. It'd be great if comments were wiped when a status changed (critical -> healthy).
Anytime you are monitoring metal, I think of Nagios almost first. It's so easy to add the basic (ping, disk, CPU, etc.) health checks that you can be up and running quite fast. When you have more specific application metrics that you want to look into, it may be more difficult to get Nagios working. For example, you don't want to know if an application is up or down, but rather how its overall health is.
Labeye Michael | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Nagios in our provisioning department to have all vitals and parameters on the radar. Nagios is really useful and powerful for both kinds of servers Windows and/or Linux. It's simple to use and configure. In the past, I implemented Nagios to a media company to monitor network backbone and equipment. It was the best monitoring tool used in this media company. If you need a powerful monitoring with a minimal cost and great scalability, there is just one choice - NAGIOS.
  • Scalability
  • Dashboarding
  • Robustness
  • Simplicity
  • Cost
  • Usability
  • Doesn't support some proprietary equipment in the telecommunication industry
Useful for networks and server solutions.
Less usefully when using some proprietary equipment without SNMP MIB
Randall Svancara | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use nagios for monitoring all of our systems, which is over 2000 servers and devices. Nagios scales well for us and we have automated the deployment with Chef. We routinely customize nagios by building our own plugins.
  • Scales well
  • Simple to install
  • Easy to customize
  • Integrations with metric stores such as InfluxDB
  • Golang integration
  • Update the web interface
  • Build out web API
  • Kubernetes integration
Physical data centers provide the best environment. Would like to see more cloud native solutions.
Igor Bujaroski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Nagios to monitor systems and services upon which we receive regular emails with statistics to measure KPI. Furthermore, we have already established a ground rule to have everything monitored, including the test systems and test services as well. Luckily, during the test period, we could identify bottlenecks and patch sooner rather than later using statistics and notifications from Nagios.
  • Regular checks - never miss a lost service
  • Statistics report - crucial to measure KPI
  • Notifications - get instant calls about incidents to prevent issues
  • Add users/services: it is sometimes difficult to add new users and services, but that is only because we haven't purchased a GUI to edit these.
  • Difficult to connect to: since it is difficult to add new users, there is no interface and we have to opt for a third-party GUI
  • No GUI: we have to opt for a third-party GUI to have a better visualization
Nagios is quite competitive compared to other monitoring tools. It is cheaper the Microsoft's version for which you have to purchase a whole range of products just to be eligible. Nagios is very easy to deploy and has no limits in terms of licensing. This makes it desirable a lot.
Ariel Dupar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I'm an end user of Nagios and we use to check the performance of CPU RAM disk space of our business servers. It's very useful for that.
  • Free Space
  • CPU used
  • RAM available and used
  • History reports of the software
  • Performance recommendations based of threads
It competes with Microsoft SCOM for checking hardware performance. Reports aren't easy to deploy.
Ludovic Huon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios is widely used to control the state of checks over the whole infrastructure in headquarters or remote offices. We wanted a product that could be widely used not only in IT but in other teams too like the R&D teams. We were searching for a free tool to harmonize the checks and to have an approach based on service dependencies.
  • Nagios Map integration to have a visual state of WAN checks.
  • Checks based on groups that allows inheritance for each new infrastructure component added.
  • Simplicity of use and the web interface and installation.
  • Stability of product for years.
  • After a certain number of hosts, Nagios tends to reach its limits in term of performance.
  • Unlike concurrent tools, Nagios needs to install an agent on each server you monitor, which complexes the way to get vthe first results or the way you maintain agent versions.
  • Compared to concurrent tools, configuration can be tricky when you are new to the tool.
For small to mid sized companies, Nagios applies well in particular if you search a free tool for covering hundreds of servers and thousands of controls. Its stability helps you to focus more on controls than on the tool upgrades themselves or bugs. With each check you can associate the script’s execution to control the state of AD groups for example. You could choose other tools if you are looking for an agentless tool with (sometimes) less complexity to create checks at the beginning, but with a reverse side - an economic model where you pay for the number of nodes you want to monitor and an annual maintenance if you want to benefit from future updates.
Andrew Kener | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently using Nagios (specifically the Check_MK plugin) to monitor approximately 200 hosts and over 4000 services. In addition to host/services we are also monitoring and alerting on application logs for our app support team. We are using the Business Intelligence feature to do cluster monitoring and sending alerts to PagerDuty for SMS, email, and phone notifications.
  • Simple. I can have a server setup within minutes that will provide 99% of all the functionality I need. Not a lot of monitoring systems can make this claim.
  • Extensible. I have yet to encounter needed functionality that couldn't be added by means of plugins, scripts, etc.
  • Stable. I have never had a Nagios server crash on me nor have I ever lost data due to bugs/instabilities in the software. I am more confidant in my Nagios install than I am in the underlying server/OS.
  • Scalability. It hasn't been an issue for us due to the small number of hosts we are monitoring but once you get into thousands+ hosts, Nagios tends to have difficulty scaling.
  • Configuration. Configuration can be difficult once you go off the beaten path, especially if you aren't proficient with scripting.
  • Agent management. Having an agent definitely simplifies some things but it adds more complexity to the overall management process.
Nagios is well-suited for smaller ( < 10,000 hosts) environments where a low-cost solution is desired. Either a support package or motivated admin is really needed to get the most value from it. It would definitely be my first recommendation for monitoring.
June 13, 2016

Ny Nagios review

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used Nagios in the past and its a great product. I would use it again to monitor my PROD/Dev/QA. We would use it to monitor our storage, Linux, Windows and at the time Citrix XenServer environment.
  • You can build your own modules.
  • Extremely flexible and configurable.
  • Configuration can be a pain.
  • Needs to be more examples of how to set up host groups and how to set up any computer/server to be tied to a host group.
June 10, 2016

Nagios review

Alan-Michael Barnes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios is used by the Operations Department in order to monitor our infrastructure and some application healthchecks.
  • There isn't a huge learning curve for someone who is new to the organization to jump in and start creating health checks and auditing the old ones.
  • It provides information clearly and organizes it for the NOC or whoever may be looking at it to have a good idea of where to start their troubleshooting.
  • At time Nagios isn't the quickest to clear alerts and some odd issues can stop it from clearing alerts that I've seen in the past, such as a new host type being added to the configuration without a valid host being spun up before hand. I've only seen it at one previous company.
It is great for monitoring our infrastructure and some applications. I haven't attempted anything outside of this.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios is the industry standard for IT systems monitoring. I use it to keep an eye on all my critical systems. Pretty much every aspect of a system can be monitored with Nagios, from a simple up/down check, to available disk space, to service status, to hardware status. It allows me to identify problems before they become user-impacting.
  • Cost - you can pay for support and an easier interface, or you can get all the monitoring you need for free.
  • Extensibility - you can pick from the vast array of checks available, or roll your own custom checks.
  • Customizability - you can pick different interfaces, add in historical graphing, configure maintenance windows, and much more.
  • Learning curve - can be steep, especially for those not familiar with Linux.
  • Messy configurations - it is easy to get your configuration files into a mess without careful management.
  • Breakability - it is easy to break your configuration accidentally, and can be difficult to figure out what you did wrong.
Nagios is perfect for companies that don't have a budget for IT monitoring, but still expect systems to be up 24x7. However, if you don't have anyone on staff who has used Linux, you might have a hard time getting it up and running. It also makes a great companion to more in depth monitoring solutions.
Derrick Barnsdale | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use Nagios to monitor more than a 1000 server operating systems. We currently monitor basic operating system components, such as disk space, CPU and memory utilization and network availability, but we have also spread our monitoring to Kerberos replication, Active Directory and Novell NDS driver monitoring by building our own scripts and adding plugins provided through the Nagios website.
  • Free to start.
  • Large open source community.
  • Well established with over 15 years in the industry.
  • Open source...that's both good and bad, you have to test every new plugin you find to make sure it'll work with your environment.
  • You have to pay for the updated Nagios XI which has a friendlier user interface.
  • It is potentially very easy to break if you don't know what you're doing.
For a start up or a company that is low on capital, downloading and configuring the free version of Nagios can be a god send. If you want pretty reports and a very nice, friendly user interface, Nagios probably isn't for you. Nagios installation and configuration, both on the server and client side does require some skill and might be a bit too advanced for novice administrators.
April 27, 2016

My Nagios experience.

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios is used by our IT department to monitor servers and services across the agency. We currently monitor 100 virtual machines and 60 domain controllers. The types of services and components we monitor are drive space, memory usage, CPU usage, up time, RDP services and others. The main business problem this solved for us was drive space monitoring as before this our help desk staff would manually check server space and update a spreadsheet. When I was hired I saw this as a time saving and real time solution as I had used Nagios in a previous job and knew some of the benefits. This server monitoring has saved our IT team time and headaches by knowing where a problem is at a glance.
  • Server monitoring.
  • Service monitoring.
  • Drive Usage.
  • Application monitoring, which may be fixed by just using the enterprise version or by spending some more time implementing Nagios fully.
  • Database monitoring, which may be fixed by just using the enterprise version or by spending some more time implementing Nagios fully.
  • Ease of implementation, of course this is an issue with the free version and not being extremely familiar with Linux. I don't think this will be an issue with more knowledge of Linux or with the enterprise version.
It is a perfect free solution for any organization on a limited budget like our organization. It is a great way to do the basic monitoring of servers and services. It can also monitor other devices but we have yet to implement that aspect. I am sure there are some scenarios that a more enterprise grade monitoring would be more appropriate but I have yet to have that be a part of the jobs I have been in but I am sure they exist.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used Nagios for over 10 years. It has been a great tool to monitor and react to emergencies and is flexible and easy to implement. Nagios allows us to connect to each of our servers and connect to all the services, ports, metrics, etc., for each server we have.
  • Trusted
  • Easy to implement
  • Many plugins already written
  • Archaic
  • Dated UI
  • Quirky
Nagios is great if you're just learning about monitoring and want something that has been used for years. I have installed it in almost every company that I have worked for and it has been a great portal to the health and well being of our systems. At this point it is archaic software and there are better ways to implement monitoring (Sensu, Zabbix, Datadog, etc).
Randall Ulmer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently we are not using Nagios, but we did for about 8 years, and I loved working with the software. We monitored servers, Netapps, switches, power, temperature, site up-time, application monitoring, revenue graph alerts, and we were just starting to use the integrated graphing. The only departments that used Nagios were Systems, NOC, and our developers.
  • Readability: Monitoring screen is very easy to read and there are several other views that are very helpful as well.
  • Easy of setup for new devices
  • Reporting: Reports are accurate and easy to update using group settings
  • Training is simple. Technicians are up and running in about 15 minutes.
  • A GUI would be nice
  • Being able to turn off monitoring a device for a period of time (removing the device from the screen)
  • Database driven configurations
Good for any typical monitoring application
Martin Melin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios is part of our monitoring stack and monitors each server and service in use. All backend engineers use Nagios, when on pager duty and when setting up new services and services.
  • Nagios is the gold standard for compatibility; there is a community provided plugin for monitoring almost anything.
  • Plugins are easy to write in almost any language - most engineers can put together a Nagios plugin in a short time if they can write a program that runs on a *nix server.
  • Check schedules and notifications are flexible, although complex to configure.
  • The web interface is complicated and hard to understand for new users.
  • The configuration syntax is brittle and breaks in unexpected ways.
  • It's very easy to get too many notifications from Nagios. This isn't really a problem due to Nagios itself, because with enough configuration you can stop it from doing this. But too many notifications very quickly leads to Nagios exhaustion in your team, which leads to people ignoring Nagios.
If you are not a UNIX/Linux shop, don't try to get Nagios into your environment. There are ways of running monitoring agents on Windows hosts but it is needlessly complicated. If you are a UNIX/Linux shop and need to monitor custom things or things that need to be protected behind a firewall, Nagios is a good choice. However, first consider if you can use one of the more modern SaaS monitoring solutions. You'll lose some flexibility but gain in ease of use and team energy spent maintaining Nagios.
Return to navigation