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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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Nagios, a popular IT infrastructure monitoring tool, has proven to be a valuable asset for organizations across various departments. With …
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Nagios for the win

6 out of 10
May 17, 2021
Incentivized
We use Nagios as our alternative Network Monitoring Software for our data centers and out branches. It helps you monitor branch with down …
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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

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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

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 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.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-13 of 13)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Pavan Mehare | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified 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 monitoring and web interface, as well as a very good easy-to-navigate icon. The host and service can be organized to manage the host and client easily.
  • Network analysis
  • Effective data collection
  • Easy implementation
  • Web UI should be better while navigating
  • Improve security
  • Need to extend support and availability
So the Nagios [Core] gave us valuable features like report analysis and graphical structure, so it will easily evaluate and track the issue. Also, the email function is very useful, so we get informed at very crucial times with findings, and also generate templates for popular endpoints which make it very better.
D. Robert Hamilton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • Dashboarding.
  • Color schemes.
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.
Chris Saenz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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).
  • Managing monitor plugins could be more centralized and consistent.
  • Configuration is not very user-friendly.
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Device availability (Uptime/Downtime) both real time and overtime, SNMP monitoring (CPU utilization, memory, temperature, fan status, disk capacity, etc.), latency tests.
  • SNMP Monitoring
  • Intuitive and simple-to-use interface
  • Great cost-value balance
  • Fault tolerance (redundancy)
  • Not so easy to restore information
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."
Nicolas Pla | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nagios all over the organization. We have several departments and each one uses an instance of Nagios to monitor their applications and infrastructure. The most important department that uses Nagios is our Networks Operations Center team. They are monitoring all our infrastructure 24/7 and configuring alerts to notify users about the status of their applications.
  • 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.
I don't know if there is a less appropriate scenario. If you have an infrastructure and need to monitor it, Nagios is the best option. Not only can you monitor, but Nagios also alerts users and allows you to take actions depending on the alert. It helps a lot with automatization and is a tool you must have in your infrastructure.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nagios in our Organization for network monitoring. It addresses the network status from Google to ISP, each LAN, and some servers.
  • Nagios network monitoring tool help us to know the status of the Internet service. We can easily identify from where the Internet service stop.
  • Nagios reduces the effort of NW team here in our organization. The NW team first task is checking Nagios. Is the whole NW is working? which one is fail? By checking Nagios the NW team can easily manage the failing LAN.
  • In our organization there are some server. We can easily their status by using Nagios.
  • Nagios to be the first network monitoring tool it needs additional improvements, like the speed of connection.
Nagios is the most significant and well suited network tool for all organizations.
Labeye Michael | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Nagios in our provisioning department to have all vitals and parameters on the radar. Nagios is really useful and powerful for both kinds of servers Windows and/or Linux. It's simple to use and configure. In the past, I implemented Nagios to a media company to monitor network backbone and equipment. It was the best monitoring tool used in this media company. If you need a powerful monitoring with a minimal cost and great scalability, there is just one choice - NAGIOS.
  • Scalability
  • Dashboarding
  • Robustness
  • Simplicity
  • Cost
  • Usability
  • Doesn't support some proprietary equipment in the telecommunication industry
Useful for networks and server solutions.
Less usefully when using some proprietary equipment without SNMP MIB
Igor Bujaroski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
  • Add users/services: it is sometimes difficult to add new users and services, but that is only because we haven't purchased a GUI to edit these.
  • Difficult to connect to: since it is difficult to add new users, there is no interface and we have to opt for a third-party GUI
  • No GUI: we have to opt for a third-party GUI to have a better visualization
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.
Ariel Dupar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
  • History reports of the software
  • Performance recommendations based of threads
It competes with Microsoft SCOM for checking hardware performance. Reports aren't easy to deploy.
June 13, 2016

Ny Nagios review

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used Nagios in the past and its a great product. I would use it again to monitor my PROD/Dev/QA. We would use it to monitor our storage, Linux, Windows and at the time Citrix XenServer environment.
  • You can build your own modules.
  • Extremely flexible and configurable.
  • Configuration can be a pain.
  • Needs to be more examples of how to set up host groups and how to set up any computer/server to be tied to a host group.
Derrick Barnsdale | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • Open source...that's both good and bad, you have to test every new plugin you find to make sure it'll work with your environment.
  • You have to pay for the updated Nagios XI which has a friendlier user interface.
  • It is potentially very easy to break if you don't know what you're doing.
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.
April 27, 2016

My Nagios experience.

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • Application monitoring, which may be fixed by just using the enterprise version or by spending some more time implementing Nagios fully.
  • Database monitoring, which may be fixed by just using the enterprise version or by spending some more time implementing Nagios fully.
  • Ease of implementation, of course this is an issue with the free version and not being extremely familiar with Linux. I don't think this will be an issue with more knowledge of Linux or with the enterprise version.
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.
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