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Nagios - Oldie but goodie
Updated March 02, 2016

Nagios - Oldie but goodie

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Nagios

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
  • Open sourced, so it's free.
  • Ugly UI so not something to show an executive team.
  • Great for understanding overall system health.
Nagios was the best in the past and why I chose it for many of the companies I've worked for. Also, coming in to a company, there is almost always a Nagios server installed and since everyone knows the software it's easy to write plugins for it. But, in 2015, Nagios is a dinosaur and needs to be replaced with better, more scalable solutions.
Nagios is great if you're just learning about monitoring and want something that has been used for years. I have installed it in almost every company that I have worked for and it has been a great portal to the health and well being of our systems. At this point it is archaic software and there are better ways to implement monitoring (Sensu, Zabbix, Datadog, etc).

Using Nagios

12 - The uptime of servers is essential to all parts of the business. Allowing everyone to see the uptime and accessibility of the infrastructure allows them to see how our servers are running. Everyone from support to IT to operations to business analysts are allowed a view to our Nagios installation.
2 - Users will need to know linux, a command line interface editing tool (vi, emacs, pico, etc) and how to correctly edit conf files. It is rather quick and easy to do. For more dynamic work the conf files will need to be setup correctly, which can be tedious but worth it.
  • Monitoring server status
  • Dynamic data checking
  • Dashboard view of server status.
  • Can alert on anything with custom written alerts
  • Can send data to other products (cacti, graphite, etc)
  • n/A
  • Continue to deploy to new servers
  • Build out new environments
  • Find new ways to send data to other products.
Nagios is awesome yet antiquated and we plan to use other products that are free and open source that will do the same thing.

Evaluating Nagios and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
The features of Nagios are ever expanding and allow users to see a full view of their infrastructure. Nagios has been around for YEARS now and many people within the industry have used and implemented it on their servers. It is easy to find employees that have used it in the past.
Well, now that their our so many other companies and products out there doing the same thing as Nagios, we would probably go with an open source product. We would probably go with sensu and then connect that to Pagerduty or VictorOps to do alerting. We would also send data on to our Graphite/Grafana infrastructure to anaylze the data.

Nagios Support

It's good and they are able to answer our questions that we have.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Knowledgeable team
Kept well informed
Immediate help available
Support cares about my success
Poor followup
Problems left unsolved
Escalation required
Need to explain problems multiple times
Slow Initial Response
No - We don't believe it is worth the extra money.
We were having an issue with creating a new configuration for a server that didn't have any plugins. I was able to reach out to Nagios Enterprises and get successfully configure the check to do what we needed it to do. Their support was very informed and ultimately fixed my problem.