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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
YouTube
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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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
(1-9 of 9)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
November 07, 2019
Excellent tool that's widely used - and best of all, it's free!
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.
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.
July 25, 2019
Powerful Monitoring tool
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
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.
August 08, 2018
Nagios Empowered Monitoring
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.
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.
June 10, 2016
Nagios review
Nagios is used by the Operations Department in order to monitor our infrastructure and some application healthchecks.
- There isn't a huge learning curve for someone who is new to the organization to jump in and start creating health checks and auditing the old ones.
- It provides information clearly and organizes it for the NOC or whoever may be looking at it to have a good idea of where to start their troubleshooting.
- At time Nagios isn't the quickest to clear alerts and some odd issues can stop it from clearing alerts that I've seen in the past, such as a new host type being added to the configuration without a valid host being spun up before hand. I've only seen it at one previous company.
May 31, 2016
Nagios - the gold standard in systems monitoring
Nagios is the industry standard for IT systems monitoring. I use it to keep an eye on all my critical systems. Pretty much every aspect of a system can be monitored with Nagios, from a simple up/down check, to available disk space, to service status, to hardware status. It allows me to identify problems before they become user-impacting.
- Cost - you can pay for support and an easier interface, or you can get all the monitoring you need for free.
- Extensibility - you can pick from the vast array of checks available, or roll your own custom checks.
- Customizability - you can pick different interfaces, add in historical graphing, configure maintenance windows, and much more.
- Learning curve - can be steep, especially for those not familiar with Linux.
- Messy configurations - it is easy to get your configuration files into a mess without careful management.
- Breakability - it is easy to break your configuration accidentally, and can be difficult to figure out what you did wrong.
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