Item: Nagios Core
Rating: 8
Author: Ludovic Huon

Overall Satisfaction with Nagios

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Affordable tool available for free to cover infrastructure supervision scope
Dynamic alerting to become proactive for user support, before incident management process is fed
Scalable tools that helps to progressively have a service dependencies approach

Alternatives Considered

PRTG Network Monitor and Centreon

We selected Nagios because of economic constraints with a tool completely free, nor to have a stable product that has reached a stable state since years. . We wanted an extensible product based on number of plugins and a product that can grab datas from many infrastructure products on the market.

Other Software Used

MS SharePoint, SolarWinds Web Help Desk, Microsoft Exchange

Likelihood to Recommend

For small to mid sized companies, Nagios applies well in particular if you search a free tool for covering hundreds of servers and thousands of controls. Its stability helps you to focus more on controls than on the tool upgrades themselves or bugs. With each check you can associate the script’s execution to control the state of AD groups for example. You could choose other tools if you are looking for an agentless tool with (sometimes) less complexity to create checks at the beginning, but with a reverse side - an economic model where you pay for the number of nodes you want to monitor and an annual maintenance if you want to benefit from future updates.

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