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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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Learn from top reviewers

Old reliable solution

Rating: 7 out of 10
May 7, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
In our organization, we use Nagios Core to monitor servers and applications for our clients. We also use it to monitor our and our customers' infrastructure for which we are c...
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Verified user
Technician
Nagios Core10 years of experience

anything or everything just monitor in Nagios Core

Rating: 10 out of 10
May 6, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
To monitor the critical business application services. get better control over the servers. Basically, Nagios Core helps us to act quickly and to reduce the impact of any bu...
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Verified user
Team Lead
Nagios Core13 years of experience

Nagios [Core]: Best Open Source Monitoring Tool

Rating: 8 out of 10
September 23, 2021
Vetted ReviewVerified 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 moni...
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Pavan Mehare
Administrator - Information Technology
Linux Administrator
Amdocs
Nagios Core2 years of experience

Nagios for the win

Rating: 6 out of 10
May 17, 2021
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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...
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Verified user
Administrator
Nagios Core5 years of experience

Nagios Core--The best free monitoring solution around!

Rating: 9 out of 10
January 22, 2021
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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...
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Verified user
Manager
Nagios Core11 years of experience

Nagios Core - sit back and monitor at ease!

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 14, 2020
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 ...
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D. Robert Hamilton
Technician - Information Technology
IT Senior Client Services Engineer
DTE Energy
Nagios Core5 years of experience

Industry standard monitoring

Rating: 7 out of 10
December 11, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 o...
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Chris Saenz
Engineer - Information Technology
Lead System Engineer
Azusa Pacific University
Nagios Core8 years of experience
Verified on LinkedIn

Excellent tool that's widely used - and best of all, it's free!

Rating: 9 out of 10
November 7, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 cou...
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Verified user
Employee
Nagios Core10 years of experience

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

Rating: 9 out of 10
October 28, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 swi...
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Verified user
Executive
Nagios Core10 years of experience

Nagios - Open Source Versatile Infrastructure Alerting Solution

Rating: 8 out of 10
October 22, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Nagios is used primarily in the Information Technology department, where it is used for proactive monitoring of server and network infrastructure and associated services.
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Verified user
Professional
Nagios Core10 years of experience

Simple to use - good value for your money

Rating: 9 out of 10
October 21, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Device availability (Uptime/Downtime) both real time and overtime, SNMP monitoring (CPU utilization, memory, temperature, fan status, disk capacity, etc.), latency tests.
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Manuel Ayala
Director - Information Technology
IT Director-Global Telecom Ops
Honeywell Inc
Nagios Core2 years of experience

If you require reliability in your IT infrastructure then you need Nagios!

Rating: 9 out of 10
October 17, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 configu...
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Verified user
Administrator
Nagios Core12 years of experience

Nagios quick review

Rating: 9 out of 10
October 17, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 ...
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Alejandro Rojas
Manager - Information Technology
Gerente de Tecnologia
ABC Color
Nagios Core10 years of experience

Powerful Monitoring tool

Rating: 10 out of 10
July 25, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 ...
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Steven Peterson
General Manager - Engineering
Senior Systems Analyst
Mainstream Technology Group
Nagios Core5 years of experience

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

Rating: 7 out of 10
March 21, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 server...
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Verified user
Administrator
Nagios Core2 years of experience
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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

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
Verified User
Technician in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 10,001+ employees
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology
Information Services Company, 201-500 employees
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Pricing

View all pricing

Single License

Free

On Premise

Single License

Free

Cloud

Entry-level set up fee?

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

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

nagios core

YouTube

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

YouTube
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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 Competitors

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.

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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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.

Reviews

(1-5 of 5)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why

Simple to use - good value for your money

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
October 21, 2019
MA
Manuel Ayala
IT Director-Global Telecom Ops
Honeywell Inc (Aviation & Aerospace, 10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Device availability (Uptime/Downtime) both real time and overtime, SNMP monitoring (CPU utilization, memory, temperature, fan status, disk capacity, etc.), latency tests.
Pros and Cons
  • SNMP Monitoring
  • Intuitive and simple-to-use interface
  • Great cost-value balance
Likelihood to Recommend
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."
Return on Investment
  • Much better network device performance metrics allowing to troubleshoot and do before/after changes comparisons
  • Has helped us to integrate with our Service Management tool (through other 3rd party tools)
  • Important part of our overall network health dashboard providing granular details at the device level (not end-to-end performance)
  • Cost is very convenient
Alternatives Considered
The cost is considerably better. Others are probably more complete and even overkilled if all you're looking for is simple SNMP alerting and reporting. If you're looking for integrated analytics or more complex reporting/alerting, there might be better options. Nagios also provides basic NetFlow monitoring in a separate module (also purchased separately) but I don't believe it's all that intuitive and might require additional efforts to set it up compared to other NetFlow tools.
Support Rating
8
I have hardly involved Nagios since platform is stable for support but the one time that I did they were very responsive. I would probably suggest faster introduction of new features. Compared to other companies that have adopted agile methodologies for development, I believe that Nagios still has some room for improvement.

Nagios - Open Source Network Monitoring

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
March 15, 2019
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Return on Investment
  • I know when I've got an outage before the phone rings. We often have dispatched techs and are working to resolve our issues long before our customers notice.
  • Nagios allows us to plan for future bottlenecks, there is very little reason to ever be surprised by a utilization issue.
  • Nagios has cost us heavily in man hours to get running and comfortable. However cost on back of man hours is better than live environment outages any day.
Alternatives Considered
We selected Nagios because of the size of its community. We've used some of the others in the field over the past few years, Nagios had the best features out of the box coupled with it's following made it an easy selection.
Other Software Used
Users and Roles
7
Network Administrator Systems Administrator Phone Administrator NOC Crew Tier 1 and 2 support
Support Headcount Required
2
Our systems admin handles the support of the Nagios platform, and we have an inhouse coder that works to make downloaded plugins fit our needs and when required writes custom code.
Business Processes Supported
  • Up/Down Alerting
  • Resource Management
  • Uptime calculation
  • Resource Utilization predictions
Innovative Uses
  • By following strings of alerts as a failure happens we can easily identify the location of an outage and in moments get an idea of services effected.
Future Planned Uses
  • We're really hoping to see Nagios catch up to some of our competitors in reporting and data collection.
Likelihood to Renew
6
We're currently looking to combine a bunch of our network montioring solutions into a single platform. Running multiple unique solutions for monitoring, data collection, compliance reporting etc has become a lot to manage.
Products Replaced
No
Key Differentiators
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
Price is always a concern, however when dealing with network monitoring and alerting, functionality needs to be at the top of the list. Nagios is a stable platform, with fantastic redundancy options. Nagios is at the top of their game.
Evaluation Lessons Learned
With all the monitoring systems we evaluated, I don't think I spent enough time focused on importing data and customizing alerts. Instead of loading a couple of machines and doing some simple testing, I would have loaded our whole environment and attempted to use the solution in a real world scenario for a month. There have been a lot of customization related questions that came out after installation that could have been answered in the evaluation period.
Easy Tasks
  • Monitoring a supported platform is extremely easy to set up.
  • Setting up email alerting works exactly as it should.
  • Finding possible solutions in the community plugins is easy, however sometimes the configuration isn't so well documented.
Difficult Tasks
  • Configuration in Nagios relies heavily on text files.
  • Graphing data is not supported out of the box, it requires additional plugins that can be complex to integrate.
Usability
4
The Nagios UI is in need of a complete overhaul. Nice graphics and trendy fonts are easy on the eyes, but the menu system is dated, the lack of built in graphing support is confusing, and the learning curve for a new user is too steep.

Nagios: DIY Full Stack Monitoring

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
March 15, 2019
JR
John Reeve
Co-founder, lead developer
Intervals (Internet, 1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
12 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Return on Investment
  • Positive: Nagios has saved us money.
  • Positive: Nagios has given us early warning of systems in trouble and we were able to fix them before it got worse.
  • Negative: The amount of time spent configuring it was more than I'd like. We take a "set it and forget it" approach to Nagios, so when it needs tuning we have to familiarize ourselves with the configuration.

Nagios - first in flexibility

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
October 02, 2017
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Return on Investment
  • Nagios has had a great ROI, as we have only invested a medium amount of time into learning the solution and it has given us essentially free monitoring since. We did take some time to write some assisting code... which can be argued to have diminished ROI. But, that code is now permanently with us and should last many versions of Nagios and its host OS.
Alternatives Considered
Nagios is more configurable than competitors and we originally wanted something we could spin up quick for some simple checks. As our needs grew, our understanding and use of Nagios grew, and it was a natural choice. Having personally used other monitoring solutions, I prefer Nagios for its flexibility.
Other Software Used

Why, why the hell I chose Nagios

Rating: 5 out of 10
Incentivized
July 24, 2017
IB
Igor Bujaroski
IT Engineer
Toyota Boshoku Europe N.V. (Automotive, 5001-10,000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios Core
4 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • Regular checks - never miss a lost service
  • Statistics report - crucial to measure KPI
  • Notifications - get instant calls about incidents to prevent issues
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Return on Investment
  • Services are stable and monitored.
  • We do not have to check systems occasionally if there is a problem.
  • It's easy to deploy so does not take lots of time to configure it initially.
Alternatives Considered
  • Cheaper and definitely easier to set up.
  • Kind of difficult to fully configure, but once Nagios is configured - you really do not need to check back if everything is still working.
  • Operations Manager needs to be monitored as well, so you need a monitoring service for the monitoring server, and that is not convenient at all.
Other Software Used
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