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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!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
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
(1-25 of 26)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
May 17, 2021
Nagios for the win
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 to [your] internet provider. Also gives you historical reports per device that helps you evaluate and track ups and down of servers or network equipment.
- 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!
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, network performance, etc. This allows our on-call staff to resolve issues before end-users are affected. It also helps us determine budget needs for IT based on age or if there is troublesome hardware.
- 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
October 22, 2019
Nagios - Open Source Versatile Infrastructure Alerting Solution
Nagios is used primarily in the Information Technology department, where it is used for proactive monitoring of server and network infrastructure and associated services.
- Monitoring and Alerting
- Service and host metrics
- Change management assistance
- End user reports
- Metrics
- Native support for features (as opposed to plugins)
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.
October 17, 2019
Nagios quick review
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 them using SNMP protocol.
Is used by the Data Center Operations Center Department and I think is not a business problem that it addresses but a matter of efficiency in the use of technical resources.
Is used by the Data Center Operations Center Department and I think is not a business problem that it addresses but a matter of efficiency in the use of technical resources.
- 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
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
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 servers in the organization providing a solid monitoring appliance at no cost.
- 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
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.
We use Nagios to monitor applications and computing resource conditions, alerting us when there are any unusual events. We also use it for generating data and network maps that we monitor.
- 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
Nagios was used as an open source system health monitoring tool by the IT security department. The tool allows you to receive alerts when system health is not at an acceptable level. It addresses the need for dedicated system administrators manually checking and validating system health on a daily basis.
- 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
We have been using Nagios since the beginning of our business. Nagios has been an important necessity to monitor our servers as well as server services. We currently monitor over 1000+ instances of Nagios for our servers in our internal IT department as well as clients' private servers to ensure they remain stable and ensure uptime.
- 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
We are currently in the beginning stages of use with Nagios. We have it set up to monitor several hosts. It is being used to monitor only specific devices at this time. The goal for us is to use it to monitor devices that we deem critical to day to day operations.
- 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.
September 27, 2018
The Best Infrastructure Monitoring Tool
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Nagios to monitor our servers, printers, and network devices. It is an excellent tool for getting a quick eye on your network and deciding if anything needs action preemptively. It has alerts you can configure that also keeps you immediately aware of items that need action NOW. I use this software every day and many times throughout the day.
- 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
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.
August 07, 2018
Nagios Overview
I recommend Nagios for whole servers, routers, switches on organizations, and application too. Nagios will send emails. Nagios will show information on equipment or applications with trouble. Nagios is very powerful.
- 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.
Nagios agent comes standard on our servers for our enterprise. It's used for component monitoring out of the box and can have other checks added for custom apps, calls, etc. Every department's server has Nagios running in one form or another.
- 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!!!
Nagios is being used primarily by the IT department but the management team makes use of its reporting features. With its robust monitoring and ease of use to set up our company has been happy with the product. Having the amount of information at our fingertips has made our jobs easier and given us the peace of mind that our systems are being monitored properly.
- 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.
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.
September 13, 2017
Nagios, the only monitoring you almost always need!
We currently use Nagios in our operations department to monitor the health of our internal tooling and customer facing products.
- Connectivity checks in nagios are simple and impactful. Having a ping check on every host should be step one in any Nagios deployment.
- The plugin network for Nagios is huge, and very extensible. Chances are someone has already wrote and shared a plugin that does exactly what you need. But if not, you can write your own.
- With features like remote plugin executor (NRPE) you can do remote checks (pull style) instead of push. Having the option to do both is great.
- The Nagios web interface is not the prettiest, and stays fairly stagnant behind more modern approaches to displaying information.
- The ability to add service comments is a nice feature but the fact you must often manually delete them is annoying. It'd be great if comments were wiped when a status changed (critical -> healthy).
August 02, 2017
Nagios it is what's for lunch
We use nagios for monitoring all of our systems, which is over 2000 servers and devices. Nagios scales well for us and we have automated the deployment with Chef. We routinely customize nagios by building our own plugins.
- Scales well
- Simple to install
- Easy to customize
- Integrations with metric stores such as InfluxDB
- Golang integration
- Update the web interface
- Build out web API
- Kubernetes integration
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Nagios is widely used to control the state of checks over the whole infrastructure in headquarters or remote offices. We wanted a product that could be widely used not only in IT but in other teams too like the R&D teams. We were searching for a free tool to harmonize the checks and to have an approach based on service dependencies.
- Nagios Map integration to have a visual state of WAN checks.
- Checks based on groups that allows inheritance for each new infrastructure component added.
- Simplicity of use and the web interface and installation.
- Stability of product for years.
- After a certain number of hosts, Nagios tends to reach its limits in term of performance.
- Unlike concurrent tools, Nagios needs to install an agent on each server you monitor, which complexes the way to get vthe first results or the way you maintain agent versions.
- Compared to concurrent tools, configuration can be tricky when you are new to the tool.
April 06, 2017
Nagios (Check_MK) Review
We are currently using Nagios (specifically the Check_MK plugin) to monitor approximately 200 hosts and over 4000 services. In addition to host/services we are also monitoring and alerting on application logs for our app support team. We are using the Business Intelligence feature to do cluster monitoring and sending alerts to PagerDuty for SMS, email, and phone notifications.
- Simple. I can have a server setup within minutes that will provide 99% of all the functionality I need. Not a lot of monitoring systems can make this claim.
- Extensible. I have yet to encounter needed functionality that couldn't be added by means of plugins, scripts, etc.
- Stable. I have never had a Nagios server crash on me nor have I ever lost data due to bugs/instabilities in the software. I am more confidant in my Nagios install than I am in the underlying server/OS.
- Scalability. It hasn't been an issue for us due to the small number of hosts we are monitoring but once you get into thousands+ hosts, Nagios tends to have difficulty scaling.
- Configuration. Configuration can be difficult once you go off the beaten path, especially if you aren't proficient with scripting.
- Agent management. Having an agent definitely simplifies some things but it adds more complexity to the overall management process.
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