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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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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

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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

(163)

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.

Reviews

(1-19 of 19)
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Nagios Core - sit back and monitor at ease!

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 14, 2020
DR
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
5 years of experience
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.
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.

Industry standard monitoring

Rating: 7 out of 10
December 11, 2019
CS
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
8 years of experience
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).
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.

Absolutely essential for any sys admin and IT department, plus it's FREE

Rating: 9 out of 10
October 28, 2019
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
10 years of experience
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.
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.

Nagios - Open Source Versatile Infrastructure Alerting Solution

Rating: 8 out of 10
October 22, 2019
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
10 years of experience
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
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.

Nagios quick review

Rating: 9 out of 10
October 17, 2019
AR
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
10 years of experience
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
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.

Nagios Core : A viable alternative....if you have the time

Rating: 7 out of 10
March 21, 2019
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
2 years of experience
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.
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.

Nagios - Open Source Network Monitoring

Rating: 8 out of 10
March 15, 2019
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
2 years of experience
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.
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.

Nagios in the beginning use stages in Higher Education

Rating: 8 out of 10
March 06, 2019
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
1 year of experience
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.
It is really good at telling what services and devices are up and which are down.

Nagios Overview

Rating: 10 out of 10
August 07, 2018
DL
Vetted Review
Nagios Core
10 years of experience
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.
  • 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.

Great for smaller and medium orgs. If larger, configure it right. Don't over-customize.

Rating: 7 out of 10
April 11, 2018
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
4 years of experience
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.
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.

Nagios - first in flexibility

Rating: 10 out of 10
October 02, 2017
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
2 years of experience
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 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.

Nagios, the only monitoring you almost always need!

Rating: 9 out of 10
September 13, 2017
DM
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
5 years of experience
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.
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.

Why, why the hell I chose Nagios

Rating: 5 out of 10
July 24, 2017
IB
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
4 years of experience
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
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.

Nagios personal experience for the enterprise world

Rating: 7 out of 10
June 20, 2017
AD
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
4 years of experience
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
It competes with Microsoft SCOM for checking hardware performance. Reports aren't easy to deploy.

Nagios helps you to know your infrastructure health in real time

Rating: 8 out of 10
June 05, 2017
LH
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
7 years of experience
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.
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.

Nagios (Check_MK) Review

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 06, 2017
AK
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
4 years of experience
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.
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.

Nagios--You can't beat the price!

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 29, 2016
DB
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
13 years of experience
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.
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.

My Nagios experience.

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 27, 2016
NH
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
10 years of 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.
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.

Nagios - Oldie but goodie

Rating: 3 out of 10
March 02, 2016
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
10 years of experience
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
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).
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