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Nagios, the only monitoring you almost always need!
September 13, 2017

Nagios, the only monitoring you almost always need!

David Mathis II | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Nagios

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).
  • Nagios being rooted in the open source community has been great for our company investment. The cost of entry is lower and the ability to contribute is open to all.
  • Just look at the price for something like New Relic which can be (as of today) $10-$20 per t2.micro server on AWS and you quickly see the benefit of leveraging tools like Nagios to fit your budget.
  • The community behind Nagios is large and this creates a wealth of support available to small companies who otherwise would not have it. Support contracts with enterprise offerings are very expensive, but with Nagios you can find tons of support online with ease.
I've already compared Nagios to New Relic, but I don't believe it is an exactly fair comparison as their core serves two different functions. I've supported Nagios environments as well as Zabbix. I like both products as great open-source monitoring solutions. I do find supporting Nagios to be much easier as the network of community around it is larger.
Anytime you are monitoring metal, I think of Nagios almost first. It's so easy to add the basic (ping, disk, CPU, etc.) health checks that you can be up and running quite fast. When you have more specific application metrics that you want to look into, it may be more difficult to get Nagios working. For example, you don't want to know if an application is up or down, but rather how its overall health is.