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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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

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

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Pricing

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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
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Product Demos

nagios core

YouTube

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

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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).
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Comparisons

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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

(1-25 of 42)
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Pavan Mehare | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Yes, our organization uses Nagios [Core] to monitor all infrastructure and it works finely in a diverse environment. It has very good documentation from implementation to monitoring and web interface, as well as a very good easy-to-navigate icon. The host and service can be organized to manage the host and client easily.
  • Network analysis
  • Effective data collection
  • Easy implementation
  • Web UI should be better while navigating
  • Improve security
  • Need to extend support and availability
So the Nagios [Core] gave us valuable features like report analysis and graphical structure, so it will easily evaluate and track the issue. Also, the email function is very useful, so we get informed at very crucial times with findings, and also generate templates for popular endpoints which make it very better.
May 17, 2021

Nagios for the win

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nagios as our alternative Network Monitoring Software for our data centers and out branches. It helps you monitor branch with down wan links so that you can escalate it to [your] internet provider. Also gives you historical reports per device that helps you evaluate and track ups and down of servers or network equipment.
  • Network Monitoring
  • Reports generation
  • Freeware
  • Develop interface to look professional
  • Gives more detailed report
  • Add monitors and sensors compatibility
For us, we use it just [as] a backup for our main Network Monitoring Systems since it only uses ICMP to monitor the device. If you are looking [for] in monitoring devices using SNMP that will provide you auto discovery and details of your device, Nagios is not for you. But as a backup platform, it is a great tool.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nagios Core as our core monitoring solution company-wide. We are alerted if any critical systems go offline or are exceeding thresholds set for disk usage, load average, network performance, etc. This allows our on-call staff to resolve issues before end-users are affected. It also helps us determine budget needs for IT based on age or if there is troublesome hardware.
  • Extremely fast alert notifications
  • Easy-to-use GUI
  • Not that difficult to configure
  • Configuration has to be done on the command line as opposed to a GUI-based config
  • Plug-ins can be a bit difficult to install at first
  • False positive alerts can be difficult to track down and fix
If you have an organization with more than 10 critical business systems, then Nagios Core is a great, free solution for monitoring. If you're looking to monitor a network or network performance, then Nagios Core is not the best choice; there are other solutions that handle that better. Nagios Core is really good at monitoring hosts and components on a host, such as a MySQL database.
D. Robert Hamilton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios Core is currently being used by our infrastructure teams and enterprise monitoring. We have about 50 users accessing the app, with 3 people serving as admins. The tool is used to monitor hosts and logs, and also dashboarding is one of the favorite pieces of the tool. We have several different apps, and Nagios is a key component to our health!
  • Host-level monitoring.
  • Log monitoring.
  • Dashboarding.
  • Color schemes.
Excellent for host-level integration and usability. End users can get right in and use the tool to monitor their environment. Easily able to add tags and groupings, which is a must nowadays. The tool can integrate with LDAP and active directory, but we don't use that. We do everything on-premises and keep users separate.
Chris Saenz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios is our enterprise monitoring solution for all servers and network devices that supporting staff needs to be alerted on. It is used by most of our IT staff, as well as other departments who manage specific applications. It is a very important tool that we use to ensure the services and applications that we host and support are functioning as necessary.
  • Monitors a variety of standard metrics.
  • Uses standard protocols (SNMP).
  • Managing monitor plugins could be more centralized and consistent.
  • Configuration is not very user-friendly.
Nagios does standard monitoring of servers and network devices very well. If you have an environment with many basic protocols to monitor, Nagios will work well out of the box for you. It also runs very reliably. Once it is set up, I have not had many problems with the service being available.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios is an excellent open-source tool. There is a large community of users who have developed scripts and make them available for other users for just about anything you could ever want to monitor. Nagios is being used to monitor various applications, servers, websites, and services. Once you have set up a few things it is very straight forward to use and configure templates to repeat the task for new devices.
  • Monitoring.
  • Notifications.
  • Integration.
  • Strong community of users with shared plugins.
  • The native graphing/trending could use updating. It is great for its traditional reporting, but seeing the graphs and trends out of the box would be helpful.
Nagios Core is a great tool. It's open-source and free, there is a great community, shared plugins, and many other reasons which make it a great tool. It's very good for small to medium-sized businesses and if you configure it appropriately it could be used for larger organizations as well.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios is used to monitor and report on the utilization of our network and server hardware. It's primarily used for our IT department and DevOps team. We use it to monitor switch and server status, and in combination with PTRG Nagios, it gives us great reporting and details within our network infrastructure.
  • Network and server status alerts if a device is in a down state.
  • Gives you the top view down of your entire network infrastructure.
  • It can be customized to your exact needs.
  • You have two options of agentless and agent monitoring.
  • Take a few steps to configure and get running.
  • Reporting needs to be more in-depth with a better layout.
  • UI needs work and needs to be streamlined for a better UI experience.
  • Wish there was better support for enterprise environments.
Nagios is great to give you a top-down view of your entire IT infrastructure. It's another tool to improve reliability and be more pro-active than reactive to problems within your IT infrastructure. I would recommend Nagios in all environments from small businesses to enterprise environments.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios is used primarily in the Information Technology department, where it is used for proactive monitoring of server and network infrastructure and associated services.
  • Monitoring and Alerting
  • Service and host metrics
  • Change management assistance
  • End user reports
  • Metrics
  • Native support for features (as opposed to plugins)
Nagios is well suited to monitoring devices such as network switches, printers, and especially servers, as well as if administrators or end users wish to receive alerts for downtime or other outages so they can be addressed. It is less appropriate for if auditing of services or logging of those services is desired, or if anything beyond up/down or specific application checks are needed in order to monitor a service.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Device availability (Uptime/Downtime) both real time and overtime, SNMP monitoring (CPU utilization, memory, temperature, fan status, disk capacity, etc.), latency tests.
  • SNMP Monitoring
  • Intuitive and simple-to-use interface
  • Great cost-value balance
  • Fault tolerance (redundancy)
  • Not so easy to restore information
All SNMP monitoring. Alerting and reports are well organized in the interface. You can include semi-complex alerts such as "Alert when CPU utilization is >90% utilization for > 10 minutes."
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nagios to monitor our internal IT infrastructure in our headquarters and remote office. Nagios being open source has great benefits by providing vast amounts of configurations capabilities and the support community is another added bonus. We have been pro-active and less reactive when issues arise and reliability has greatly increased.
  • I have not run into a device that Nagios can't monitor.
  • One of the best parts is that Nagios is open source and free!
  • It has great customization and can be configured to your exact needs.
  • The learning curve with Nagios is a little steep and can take some time.
  • Wish Nagios sold a cloud option or managed option.
  • UI needs improvement.
Nagios is great at monitoring your internal IT infrastructure and is highly customized to fit your exact needs. Our reliability has improved vastly. We are able to monitor the system more closely and resolve issues before they happen. It's less suited for a hybrid infrastructure.
October 17, 2019

Nagios quick review

Alejandro Rojas | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In my case, Nagios is used as early alert on sensitive equipment in our data center such as servers, switches, routers and firewall, even on precision air conditioner, all of them using SNMP protocol.
Is used by the Data Center Operations Center Department and I think is not a business problem that it addresses but a matter of efficiency in the use of technical resources.
  • The use of SNMP Protocol is easy, transparent and almost effortless
  • The event handler has proved to be an extraordinary tool
  • the ability to work with other tools such as rrdt for graphics and nagvis for maps
  • Configuration
  • User interface
  • Native applications for Graphics
In Data Centers Controls as first alert dashboards, in a Network Operation Center to map hot spots or graphs data bandwidth usage. Take advantage of event handlers to perform automated event based tasks or trigger email (sms) alert as a result of those events. As a result of his difficult configuration process it may not suitable for escenarios where you have to scale as a regular basis.
Steven Peterson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nagios along with several hundred custom checks to monitor our environment and customer environments. We have been running Nagios Open source for 15 years, I have been directly involved in managing it for 5 years. It addresses our need for Systems monitoring and works alongside many other tools in our Open source Ecosystem
  • Endpoint Monitoring
  • Raising Issues
  • Network Monitoring
  • Steep Learning curve
  • Highly customizable to a fault
It is well suited for use with skilled system administrators who know what they need to monitor and what they need for alerts.
It is not well suited if you just want general monitoring with out a good grasp of why they are monitoring.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As an alternative to a paid solution, Nagios Core was implemented as a monitoring tool for several servers. The solution if successful would have been rolled out to all servers in the organization providing a solid monitoring appliance at no cost.
  • Extreme customization through add-ons provided by a wide community of users.
  • Simple yet effective interface. Provides essential information to the administrator in an easily readable format.
  • Best part, the Core version is free and fully functional.
  • Runs on Linux and is fairly light.
  • The configuration of the application can easily be backed up for DR purposes. In most cases a simple compressed folder wold suffice.
  • Allows agent\agentless monitoring.
  • Takes some work to get running. Installation documentation while complete was not always clear necessitating a trip to various help forums. Unless the XL version is used.
  • Installation of add-ons in Nagios Core can be difficult as most depend on creator supplied documentation. At times provided instructions made assumptions which resulted in a lot of time in extra research to get them installed.
  • Built in reports are simplistic.
  • No realtime graphing unless an add-on is installed.
  • Lack of a proper installation file\script. Install of the application is done mainly via CLI and by running supplied commands. This may turn away some users.
Nagios Core would best be suited for a small organization with about 50-100 computers. With the free version, the ability to deploy on a Linux box allows the business to benefit from a free, fully functional and heavily customization tool that can, if done right, hold its own against paid options.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios is being used to monitor and report on the utilization of some of our network hardware. It's primary use is restricted to our IT department, with a couple of additional users. We use it to monitor switch status, and mated with MRTG Nagios gives us bandwidth detail on a per port basis.
  • Up/Down Alerting.
  • Monitoring of supported applications (SQL, Exchange, etc).
  • Upon an alert, Nagios' ability to fire off scripts allows us to either fix problems automatically or gather data about an issue as soon as it happens.
  • Support for third party applications and hardware relies heavily on open source community driven plugins. Deploying new platforms to Nagios can be a bit of a job because of this, often plugins are unpolished, undocumented or outright broken. You have to be willing to spend some time tweaking to make this worth while.
  • The Nagios UI is not the best. Even with the new update, it's still quite evident that it's an updated version of an old system. While it's hard to re-arrange a tool like this, there comes a time when a UI overhaul is just what you have to do.
  • Nagios was quite obviously built to focus on alerting and event management. Attempting to use it also as a data collection tool can be frustrating and require a lot of plugins.
Nagios is primarily an open source technology. It's very well suited for environments that either work on a restricted budget and require a solution that can be customized heavily to fit. I would not recommend it to anyone with a limited time frame, tech skills, or someone looking for a canned monitoring or data collecting solution.
John Reeve | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nagios to monitor our servers to make sure they are online and healthy. We use it in addition to third-party monitoring services so we have redundancy in monitoring. Nagios tells us if the host is up or not and if any of its services are struggling. The ability to monitor services is nice because it gives us an early warning and we can fix problems before they become critical. We are using Nagios to monitor basic services like web servers and databases.
  • It can monitor just about anything because of its extensive plugin directory.
  • It's free, so it is a great solution if you are on a limited budget.
  • It can be customized any way you'd like, so you have complete control over the delivery and presentation of notifications.
  • It's built by engineers for engineers so setting it up and configuring it is relatively complicated. It could really use a simplified configuration approach, or a GUI to set it up instead of editing config files.
  • I'd like to see the option to have service notification settings inherited from the host setting notifications. They have to be set up separately but they are often the same, so it would be nice to have less redundancy.
Nagios is great for engineers, sys admins, and do it yourself types. If any of my colleagues are of this type of field I'll recommend Nagios. If you are not familiar with the Linux command line, I would sway you away from Nagios and recommend a third party web-based monitoring service instead.
Ricardo Melo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nagios to monitor applications and computing resource conditions, alerting us when there are any unusual events. We also use it for generating data and network maps that we monitor.
  • Monitor applications and computing resources.
  • Alert admins or administration groups by email.
  • Generate diverse statistics and monitored network maps.
  • Easier installation of Nagios.
  • There was a situation I experienced in which I monitored servers from some clients where I could not access them when they were behind a firewall doing NAT. I had to solve by applying a parameter in the commands.cfg file.
  • Problems with Network Configuration.
Nagios is essential in a scenario where it is necessary to solve problems with monitored computational resources as soon as they are detected. It's also suited to manage SLA of network links and monitor to generate data about the use of these computational resources. I do not see an environment where it would not be appropriate to use the tool.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios was used as an open source system health monitoring tool by the IT security department. The tool allows you to receive alerts when system health is not at an acceptable level. It addresses the need for dedicated system administrators manually checking and validating system health on a daily basis.
  • Network Monitoring - Nagios monitors the network for problems caused by overloaded data links or network connections, as well as monitoring routers, switches.
  • Server Monitoring - Agent and agentless monitoring solutions available with a multitude of plugins.
  • Application Monitoring - Detect application, service or process problems.
  • Interface - The interface can be pretty confusing at times and could use a bit of work.
  • Support - Easier to find help in community forums rather than calling for support since it is an open-source tool.
Best suited in small environments as there is a lot of manual configuration and tuning needed. Large organizations will have a tough time configuring rules when there are hundreds of devices.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using Nagios since the beginning of our business. Nagios has been an important necessity to monitor our servers as well as server services. We currently monitor over 1000+ instances of Nagios for our servers in our internal IT department as well as clients' private servers to ensure they remain stable and ensure uptime.
  • Monitor server uptime via ping options
  • Monitor server services such as HTTP, load, and server resources
  • Alert us to any issues a server might have so we can look into them right away
  • Minimal support as there is mostly just a user-based support community instead of the typical customer support option
  • If someone was new at setting it up, it's a time-consuming configuration in order to get the return/results you are looking for
  • Some security concerns since it is open source and any hackers can access the code to find vulnerabilities
Nagios is well suited for everyone whether there is 1 server or 100+. It's a way of keeping your server secure and up. The alternative is just keeping the terminal open 24/7 but that won't tell you everything at once. You would need to look for different issues which Nagios assists with.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently in the beginning stages of use with Nagios. We have it set up to monitor several hosts. It is being used to monitor only specific devices at this time. The goal for us is to use it to monitor devices that we deem critical to day to day operations.
  • It can tell when a device is online or not.
  • It can tell whether a particular service is accessible or not.
  • It can notify when a device or service is no longer available.
  • The Birdseye View is a nice overview of devices.
  • The web user interface could be better.
  • The home dashboard needs to have more information.
  • The home dashboard should give more insight into what is down and why.
  • It would be nice if it had an agent to put on servers to monitor more things.
  • However, I am not sure that is the real purpose of Nagios. Just a suggestion of a feature I would like to see perhaps in the future.
It is really good at telling what services and devices are up and which are down.
Nicolas Pla | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nagios all over the organization. We have several departments and each one uses an instance of Nagios to monitor their applications and infrastructure. The most important department that uses Nagios is our Networks Operations Center team. They are monitoring all our infrastructure 24/7 and configuring alerts to notify users about the status of their applications.
  • Monitoring infrastructure status
  • Alerts about infrastructure status
  • Reporting about services and checks
  • You need experience to configure checks.
  • Would like to see a cloud solution.
I don't know if there is a less appropriate scenario. If you have an infrastructure and need to monitor it, Nagios is the best option. Not only can you monitor, but Nagios also alerts users and allows you to take actions depending on the alert. It helps a lot with automatization and is a tool you must have in your infrastructure.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Nagios to monitor our servers, printers, and network devices. It is an excellent tool for getting a quick eye on your network and deciding if anything needs action preemptively. It has alerts you can configure that also keeps you immediately aware of items that need action NOW. I use this software every day and many times throughout the day.
  • The software alerts me when servers are running low on disk space.
  • Nagios keeps me aware when a server is being heavily utilized with CPU/RAM.
  • This software even lets us know when printers are low on toner.
  • It would be nice to create alerts from the web interface.
  • You need to have some background knowledge of Linux to use this software.
  • The initial configuration is a little tricky.
If you have a lot of servers and network devices to keep an eye on Nagios is an excellent product. It gives you both a quick overview of the network as well as alerts you when action is needed. As long as you are comfortable with Linux I highly recommend you implement Nagios as your infrastructure monitoring tool.
Shawn Brito | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As Nagios was the first monitoring system available for users about 15 years ago, I decided to implement the monitoring solution for a few dozen servers in the organization. However over time, the server-count had increased to 500+ while service-counts increased to 5000+. Nagios continued to remain stable for years on a simple dual-core(2Gb machine). Its ability to proactively detect issues in the system keeps our engineers informed hours (or days) ahead of a pending disaster.

As Nagios employes both Pull & Push Monitoring, implementing the plugins behind a firewall was never a hassle. Customizations were simple as any engineer with basic computer language knowledge can create plugins within minutes. I specifically choose bash, java & php as that's more familiar to me, while others chose Python,Perl or C#.

I have configured Nagios with the following technologies for better user experience.
  • MySQL (Storage & Retrieval) using the NDOUtil
  • NRDP (For push alerting when your servers are not accessible due to firewall rules)
  • Pnp4Nagios (for basic RRD graphing - I have tweaked the RRD settings to allow granular data over months of storage)
  • Grafana (for easy aggregated graphing, dashboards, heat-maps, alerts, user )
  • Ability to monitor the Application Logic - Regardless of the language the application was written, a simple plugin script can be quickly constructed to measure the key matrix of a running application (memory, heap, cpu%, db-conns, limits, delays in functions).
  • Open Source and the largest community of developers. There's a plugin for everything, including surveillance equipment, cameras, big-data analysis, AWS & Microsoft services. Over 10,000 plugins are available.
  • The Nagios data can be stored and plotted to any serial graphing system. We chose Grafana as it supports query graphing & dashboards.
  • Configuring and deploying the various open source plugins can be troublesome at first. It takes a bit of patience to connect all the various components (Nagios, NDOUtils, MySQL, NRDP, Pnp4Nagios, Batch-Processing, Grafana).
  • Most configurations are done through the command & configuration files. Although it has exceptional tuning, there is a moderate learning curve.
  • The Nagios UI might need better CSS styling as it still has the year 2005 look and feel. Although there are several mediocre UIs available, the heart of Nagios lies in monitoring.
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.

August 07, 2018

Nagios Overview

Dario Leon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
I recommend Nagios for whole servers, routers, switches on organizations, and application too. Nagios will send emails. Nagios will show information on equipment or applications with trouble. Nagios is very powerful.
  • Nagios has a big community, maybe each day you have a new programmed plugin or a plugin for new hardware or software. This is perfect because they work with Nagios XI and Nagios Core (paid and free version).
  • You can use the free version (that is limited version), but if you want to go to the paid version (Nagios XI) with more features, you don't need to migrate all the information. [You] only [have to] update and integrate.
  • Nagios is not married to a big enterprise of software or hardware, this is marvelous. Nagios can monitor all platforms and major applications.
  • Best monitoring since [the] cell phone. Today it's functional but ugly.
  • Best platform for sending to an app (like WhatsApp) telegram messages.
  • The best scenarios: Big or medium companies with own [their] datacenters. For example 20 or more servers, routers, switches.
  • The worst scenarios: Servers in the cloud (they can use other solutions) or less than 5 servers in the company.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios agent comes standard on our servers for our enterprise. It's used for component monitoring out of the box and can have other checks added for custom apps, calls, etc. Every department's server has Nagios running in one form or another.
  • Open Source
  • Easy to set up, build checks
  • It's been around for a while, so integrations to more modern monitoring systems have a Nagios plug-in.
  • If it gets too customized, upgrading becomes very difficult. They've addressed this in recent years with Nagios Core and add-ons, but legacy still has this problem.
Great for basic, up/down component monitoring. Also good for canary checks, file directory monitoring, etc. It's a good Boolean monitoring tool, but once it fires off an alert, obtaining more data is problematic. It's nice, but it can be noisy if not implemented in an enterprise-wide, scalable, and manageable way.
Eric Krueger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nagios is being used primarily by the IT department but the management team makes use of its reporting features. With its robust monitoring and ease of use to set up our company has been happy with the product. Having the amount of information at our fingertips has made our jobs easier and given us the peace of mind that our systems are being monitored properly.
  • 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.
  • There could be a better tutorial for setup but the overall system is very easy.
  • More options for notification would be great.
  • There could be a few more customization reporting functions.
This tool is very appropriate for IT staff to have the information they need at their fingertips. Notifications are timely and response time to issues has been cut down immensely. If you are looking for Nagios to be the one network monitoring tool for your department then you are in the right place. Nagios will allow your staff to focus on problem resolution and create efficiency by putting more information at their disposal.
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