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Amazon CloudWatch vs Nagios XI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.1
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost savings and control, aiding compliance but challenges remain in quantifying returns during cloud migrations.
Sentiment score
6.6
Nagios XI enhances efficiency and time management but concerns about increased costs affect ROI perception across organizations.
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost-saving advantages by being an inbuilt solution that requires no separate setup or maintenance for monitoring tasks.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon CloudWatch support is generally praised for responsiveness and expertise, though experiences and costs vary by support package.
Sentiment score
6.5
Nagios XI support is mixed; praised for responsiveness but criticized for high cost, complex licensing, and delayed responses.
While using their cloud and cloud resources, if you have an issue with CloudWatch, you must pay additional monthly fees to get time from dedicated tech support.
In recent years, due to business expansion, knowledge levels among support engineers seem to vary.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon CloudWatch is praised for its scalability, managing large workloads effortlessly and adapting to diverse performance monitoring needs.
Sentiment score
7.1
Nagios XI is scalable for small to medium environments but faces challenges in large infrastructures and cloud adaptability.
Amazon CloudWatch's scalability is managed by AWS.
If the user interface isn’t presenting data well, it becomes difficult to manage when scaling.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon CloudWatch is reliable and stable, though users experience occasional logging delays and minor complexities in query customization.
Sentiment score
7.3
Nagios XI is stable, but large deployments may experience performance issues, database problems, and minor network dependencies.
I sometimes notice slowness when Amazon CloudWatch agents are installed on machines with less capacity, causing me to use other monitoring tools.
It is very stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon CloudWatch needs enhancements in customization, log management, pricing, integrations, data visibility, and user interface for better performance.
Nagios XI's interface is outdated, lacks scalability, needs better cloud integration, APIs, automation, and improved documentation.
When using third-party dashboards such as Kibana or Grafana and other visualization tools, there should be a way to feed CloudWatch's data and logging capabilities into these visualization tools.
Amazon CloudWatch charges extra for custom metrics, which is a significant disadvantage.
Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features.
Many tools have poor user interfaces, making them hard to manage and navigate.
The GUI could be improved. It's a bit too basic.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon CloudWatch pricing is usage-based, often cost-effective, but may increase with data use and custom metrics.
Nagios XI provides cost-efficient enterprise-level monitoring with reasonable pricing, appreciated for its features and open-source options.
Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.
Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline.
We are using the free, open-source version.
The pricing for the Nagios XI product is good and better than other solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon CloudWatch offers metrics, alerts, automation, and analytics with seamless AWS integration, scalability, and third-party service support.
Nagios XI provides customizable, flexible, and scalable IT infrastructure monitoring with real-time alerts and extensive plugin support.
Being an inbuilt solution from AWS, it saves time on installation, setup, and maintenance.
The best features of Amazon CloudWatch need to improve visibility into the network because when using hundreds of network resources such as transit gateway, VPNs, routers, route tables, and firewalls, it does not give many details in a structured manner.
I like its filtering capability and its ability to give the cyber engine insights.
Nagios XI simplifies our setup and reduces the time spent configuring monitoring tools.
The alerting system is very effective.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudWatch
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (13th), Log Management (13th)
Nagios XI
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
58
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (14th), Server Monitoring (10th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (19th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 2.4%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nagios XI is 3.5%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Rahul Kundu - PeerSpot reviewer
Proactively address issues with seamless monitoring while enhancing custom metrics functionality
We use CloudWatch for monitoring and logging. It helps us monitor our applications' performance, particularly in ensuring that every API hit returns a response within four seconds, which is our SLA. We also monitor invocation errors in Lambda and use CloudWatch alerts to notify us of any issues…
Amir  Said - PeerSpot reviewer
Effective alerting enhances network monitoring experience with an easy setup
We love Nagios XI due to the fact that JPS Web is very useful. JPS monitors the modem and performs switching, monitoring the computer, and performing switching. We implement some applications and traffic monitoring. The alerting system is very effective. For instance, if we have an alarm on some RAM storage if the traffic is cut or dropped.
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860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Real Estate/Law Firm
5%
Educational Organization
18%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?
Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?
Apart from traceability of network resources, Amazon CloudWatch needs to be more interoperable with other tools because many companies are starting to use AI-based dashboards. When using third-part...
What do you like most about Nagios XI?
It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nagios XI?
The pricing for the Nagios XI product is good and better than other solutions. I would give it a four or five.
What needs improvement with Nagios XI?
The user interface needs improvement. Many tools have poor user interfaces, making them hard to manage and navigate.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
Nagios has over one million users globally, including AOL, DHL, McAfee, MCI, MTV, Yahoo!, Universal, Toshiba, Sony, Siemens, and JPMorgan Chase.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Nagios XI and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.