Back to the future with Nagios XI
Updated March 23, 2020
Back to the future with Nagios XI

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Nagios XI
For in-house infrastructure monitoring and application performance monitoring across the entire organization. Some 1000 hosts, 50+ Applications, various 3rd party integrations. We do both monitoring and logging, also using a single view Fusion product provided by Nagios. We have started using Nagios to collect and store detailed performance information about our infrastructure and ended up developing end-2-end monitoring solutions, talking back to Nagios XI via its API for alerting and reporting purposes.
Pros
- 3rd party integrations via open API.
- Extremely flexible and configurable long term storage of the very detailed performance information (years of per 1-5 min perf data numbers).
- Small Nagios XI footprint (very efficient MySQL DB and flat files for perf data), making it powerful tool for thousands of checks and hundreds of reports.
- Responsive support, willing to provide resolution outside the box and by various means possible.
Cons
- Robust, but visually old interface. Requires a lot of work to become presentable.
- Small selection of dashlets to construct new views.
- No MS Azure monitoring ability, nothing for “as service,” very limited Amazon cloud monitoring abilities.
- Questionable price politics (could make it a lot less for developing markets to actually increase use of the product and R&D budgets).
- No report designers nor the ability to create new reports. No changes in this area for years.
- Overall lack of new developments, making this product more and more outdated.
- Very good ROI.
- Good results as capacity mgmt tool.
- Good results as application monitoring tool.
- Datadog, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor and SolarWinds AppOptics
Nagios XI is better supported vs SolarWinds, needs less manual administration work vs Datadog and a lot less expensive for a long as you are willing to compromise on the look and some functionalities. Moreover, SolarWinds database design prevents one from storing any meaningful data for an extended period of time (creating averages of the averages of the averages), where Nagios could be set for keeping years of detailed information without large storage or the overutilized DB engine. In both Datadog and SolarWinds trials we could not get answers to many of our questions, configure working solutions out of the box by using the inline documentation. Nagios XI does not have limitations, offers such as AppOptics impose on the customers (making it very expensive and absolutely not a real life product). Overall, Nagios XI is a great tool, requiring a lot of R&D “yesterday” to make it beat all the competition on all fronts. That is assuming you have an extensive knowledge in the many areas of IT (thus knowing what should be monitored and how to interpret the data).
Do you think Nagios XI delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Nagios XI's feature set?
No
Did Nagios XI live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Nagios XI go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Nagios XI again?
Yes
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