Nagios [Core]: Best Open Source Monitoring Tool
Yes, our organization uses Nagios [Core] to monitor all infrastructure and it works finely in a diverse environment. It has very good …
Nagios Core
Nagios Core
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Pricing
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Free
On Premise
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Free
Cloud
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- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.nagios.com/products/nagios…
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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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.
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
- among others
Nagios Core Competitors
Nagios Core Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, SaaS |
|---|---|
| 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 |
Comparisons
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Frequently Asked Questions
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.
What are Nagios Core's top competitors?
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM), and N-able Risk Intelligence are common alternatives for Nagios Core.
What is Nagios Core's best feature?
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 7.7.
Who uses Nagios Core?
The most common users of Nagios Core are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees) and the Information Technology & Services industry.
Reviews and Ratings
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September 23, 2021
Nagios [Core]: Best Open Source Monitoring Tool
- Network analysis
- Effective data collection
- Easy implementation
- Web UI should be better while navigating
- Improve security
- Need to extend support and availability
May 17, 2021
Nagios for the win
- Network Monitoring
- Reports generation
- Freeware
- Develop interface to look professional
- Gives more detailed report
- Add monitors and sensors compatibility
January 22, 2021
Nagios Core--The best free monitoring solution around!
- Extremely fast alert notifications
- Easy-to-use GUI
- Not that difficult to configure
- Configuration has to be done on the command line as opposed to a GUI-based config
- Plug-ins can be a bit difficult to install at first
- False positive alerts can be difficult to track down and fix
February 14, 2020
Nagios Core - sit back and monitor at ease!
- Host-level monitoring.
- Log monitoring.
- Dashboarding.
- Color schemes.
December 11, 2019
Industry standard monitoring
- 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.
November 07, 2019
Excellent tool that's widely used - and best of all, it's free!
- 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.
- 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
- Monitoring and Alerting
- Service and host metrics
- Change management assistance
- End user reports
- Metrics
- Native support for features (as opposed to plugins)
October 21, 2019
Simple to use - good value for your money
- SNMP Monitoring
- Intuitive and simple-to-use interface
- Great cost-value balance
- Fault tolerance (redundancy)
- Not so easy to restore information
- 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.
October 17, 2019
Nagios quick review
- 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
July 25, 2019
Powerful Monitoring tool
- Endpoint Monitoring
- Raising Issues
- Network Monitoring
- Steep Learning curve
- Highly customizable to a fault
- 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
- 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 15, 2019
Nagios: DIY Full Stack Monitoring
- 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.
- It's built by engineers for engineers so setting it up and configuring it is relatively complicated. It could really use a simplified configuration approach, or a GUI to set it up instead of editing config files.
- I'd like to see the option to have service notification settings inherited from the host setting notifications. They have to be set up separately but they are often the same, so it would be nice to have less redundancy.
- Monitor applications and computing resources.
- Alert admins or administration groups by email.
- Generate diverse statistics and monitored network maps.
- Easier installation of Nagios.
- There was a situation I experienced in which I monitored servers from some clients where I could not access them when they were behind a firewall doing NAT. I had to solve by applying a parameter in the commands.cfg file.
- Problems with Network Configuration.
March 13, 2019
Nagios - You get what you don't pay for
- Network Monitoring - Nagios monitors the network for problems caused by overloaded data links or network connections, as well as monitoring routers, switches.
- Server Monitoring - Agent and agentless monitoring solutions available with a multitude of plugins.
- Application Monitoring - Detect application, service or process problems.
- Interface - The interface can be pretty confusing at times and could use a bit of work.
- Support - Easier to find help in community forums rather than calling for support since it is an open-source tool.
March 13, 2019
Nagios keeps us on our toes
- Monitor server uptime via ping options
- Monitor server services such as HTTP, load, and server resources
- Alert us to any issues a server might have so we can look into them right away
- Minimal support as there is mostly just a user-based support community instead of the typical customer support option
- If someone was new at setting it up, it's a time-consuming configuration in order to get the return/results you are looking for
- Some security concerns since it is open source and any hackers can access the code to find vulnerabilities
March 06, 2019
Nagios in the beginning use stages in Higher Education
- 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.
March 02, 2019
Do you Nagios your infrastructure?
- Monitoring infrastructure status
- Alerts about infrastructure status
- Reporting about services and checks
- You need experience to configure checks.
- Would like to see a cloud solution.
September 27, 2018
The Best Infrastructure Monitoring Tool
- The software alerts me when servers are running low on disk space.
- Nagios keeps me aware when a server is being heavily utilized with CPU/RAM.
- This software even lets us know when printers are low on toner.
- It would be nice to create alerts from the web interface.
- You need to have some background knowledge of Linux to use this software.
- The initial configuration is a little tricky.
August 08, 2018
Nagios Empowered Monitoring
- 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.
August 07, 2018
Nagios Overview
- 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.
- 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.
March 02, 2018
Three Cheers for Nagios!!!
- Monitoring of services is one of the biggest benefits for our company. Being able to respond in a timely fashion keeps business smooth.
- Hardware and device monitoring are easy to set up with proper parameters.
- Notification to key staff to be able to respond quickly makes issues go away faster.
- There could be a better tutorial for setup but the overall system is very easy.
- More options for notification would be great.
- There could be a few more customization reporting functions.