Nagios - Open Source Network Monitoring
Rating: 8 out of 10
March 15, 2019
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
- 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.
- Zabbix and Spiceworks
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.
7
Network Administrator
Systems Administrator
Phone Administrator
NOC Crew
Tier 1 and 2 support
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.
- Up/Down Alerting
- Resource Management
- Uptime calculation
- Resource Utilization predictions
- 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.
- We're really hoping to see Nagios catch up to some of our competitors in reporting and data collection.
No
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.