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Nagios, a popular IT infrastructure monitoring tool, has proven to be a valuable asset for organizations across various departments. With …
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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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
Product Demos
nagios core
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Nagios Exploit DEMO - Remote CodeExec CVE-2016-9565 & Root PrivEsc CVE-2016-9566
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Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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.
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
- Sematext Infrastructure Monitoring module
- among others
Nagios Core Competitors
Nagios Core Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android |
| Supported Countries | Global |
| Supported Languages | English, 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.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM), and N-able Risk Intelligence are common alternatives for Nagios Core.
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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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!
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- Pros
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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
(1-19 of 19)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 14, 2020
Nagios Core - sit back and monitor at ease!
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.
December 11, 2019
Industry standard monitoring
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 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.
October 22, 2019
Nagios - Open Source Versatile Infrastructure Alerting Solution
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)
October 17, 2019
Nagios quick review
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.
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
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.
March 15, 2019
Nagios - Open Source Network Monitoring
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.
March 06, 2019
Nagios in the beginning use stages in Higher Education
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.
August 07, 2018
Nagios Overview
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.
April 11, 2018
Great for smaller and medium orgs. If larger, configure it right. Don't over-customize.
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.
October 02, 2017
Nagios - first in flexibility
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 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.
September 13, 2017
Nagios, the only monitoring you almost always need!
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).
July 24, 2017
Why, why the hell I chose Nagios
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
June 20, 2017
Nagios personal experience for the enterprise world
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
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.
April 06, 2017
Nagios (Check_MK) Review
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.
April 29, 2016
Nagios--You can't beat the price!
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.
April 27, 2016
My Nagios experience.
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.
March 02, 2016
Nagios - Oldie but goodie
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