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Nagios XI vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Nagios XI
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
16th
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 (15th), Server Monitoring (9th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
17th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (16th), Container Monitoring (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Nagios XI is 4.0%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 2.2%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications2.2%
Nagios XI4.0%
Other93.8%
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Emmanuel Appiah Boateng - PeerSpot reviewer
Network and Security Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Simplifies setup and requires user interface enhancement
Nagios XI is easy to install, which sets it apart from other open-source solutions I've tried. Typically, setting up a monitoring system on Linux involves cloning files from GitHub, building it, and installing many dependencies, but with Nagios XI, it wasn't like that. Nagios XI simplifies our setup and reduces the time spent configuring monitoring tools.
AS
Consultant at HCLTech
Automation and insightful diagnostics elevate operations while improvements are welcome
The new version 8.18 has brought significant improvements. The main purpose of using this tool is having a single console to manage all entities. The cloud integration capabilities, including private, public, and hybrid, are already well-implemented. The ability to manage multiple vCenters across different geographical locations is very effective. The new Skyline health feature and certificate and licensing management are particularly useful improvements. The dashboard's overview tab provides comprehensive information about current vCenter status, resizable amounts, reclamation opportunities, anomalies, diagnostics, licensing, and certificates. However, there is room for improvement in application analysis. The current functionality lacks detailed monitoring at the kernel level, focusing mainly on CPU, memory, and storage matrices. Enhanced application monitoring capabilities, including tracking downtime for specific types of applications such as transactional or e-commerce applications, would be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"All of them, but mainly: Highly-efficient server performance monitoring engine Configuration wizards Infrastructure management Configuration snapshot."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of processes."
"In my experience with Nagios, I've found that the most valuable features are the scalability and extensibility through using scripts."
"It has a wide variety of plugins in existence, but when there's no plugin available it is quite simple to integrate one's own programs and scripts."
"We love Nagios XI due to the fact that JPS Web is very useful."
"The most useful aspect of this solution is the ability to customize it for the client agent."
"Nagios XI is an outstanding network Monitoring tool, which can be tweaked to suit any environment and it is a good solution for business looking for remarkable features at zero cost."
"Nagios XI is stable."
"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility."
"This solution will give you a single pane of glass for everything, and centralized monitoring."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
 

Cons

"We often need to develop custom plugins to get Nagios to work the way we want it to work because the features we need are not always available in Nagios."
"The product uses the backend as Perl and could be modified to a more lightweight solution like what's being offered by other vendors."
"WebUI should be improved (visual aspect) and should incorporate non-relational databases."
"We'd like to see more integration capabilities."
"The PNP4Nagios plugin not working easily with XI is an issue for me, because some open source monitoring plugins do not work out of the box. But in the end, you learn to live with it."
"The way Nagios displays information isn't easy for a new user to understand. It's not intuitive enough. You need to read some tutorials or be trained to understand what it's displaying. Also, I think it needs more features to improve network visibility because there are some things you can't detect."
"We are implementing our hybrid cloud strategy, and it will most likely not be suitable for monitoring our public cloud assets."
"Nagios XI can improve network and hardware monitoring, these parameters should be simplified to allow usage for monitoring. Additionally, if there was automatic reporting it would be helpful."
"They could make it more easy to plug-in data so that a nontechnical person will be able to use it, like accountants or finance people. That way they don't have to ask us."
"It could use a URL document server. Everything in the market is moving towards automation and everybody's looking for the single click operations as well relational data locality."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Nagios XI is an expensive solution."
"This solution is very expensive, at approximately $5,000 USD when I purchased it, which is why I haven't upgraded my version in several years."
"For the cost of the commercial product and support, and taking into account the open source characteristics of it, I believe it is difficult to a better value."
"For our country in North Africa, it's expensive and we could purchase another solution for that price. But it's a reasonable price if we're speaking in international terms."
"Nagios XI is open source."
"The pricing is high with separate licensing for the product and support."
"You can grow into the higher-priced scale as they learn how to utilize the features for Nagios XI."
"As it is not an agentless tool, I think it is expensive."
"The licensing costs are very high, particularly when you consider that we have to purchase a level 1 license for every integration, such as the load balancer, HAProxy, and the MSSP. And if you want to use vSAN, that's another license. Then, of course, Tanzu Observability has its own separate license."
"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
"I don't have the details. In our case, there is a mixture in place. We have production usage, and we are also doing training for VMware. So, we also have a training instance. It is worth the money you would spend on it. That's because if you were to build all of this yourself by using some of the open source tools, then you would need a lot of time."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
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
10%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Government
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What is your primary use case for Nagios XI?
I normally use Nagios XI for our servers. It's not particularly used for network equipment, however, I use it for monitoring our server performance, including CPU, memory, data, and services runnin...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The solution includes cost drivers that can be configured according to your environment. You can input server-wise, CPU-wise, storage, and memory costs per hour or day. Once cost drivers are provid...
What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The new version 8.18 has brought significant improvements. The main purpose of using this tool is having a single console to manage all entities. The cloud integration capabilities, including priva...
What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
I have been involved in several projects where I had to implement automation and monitoring alerting. I performed automation using VMware Aria Operations for Applications. There is an automation ta...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nagios has over one million users globally, including AOL, DHL, McAfee, MCI, MTV, Yahoo!, Universal, Toshiba, Sony, Siemens, and JPMorgan Chase.
1. Atlassian 2. Cisco 3. Databricks 4. DigitalOcean 5. Equinix 6. Fidelity Investments 7. Google 8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 9. Honeywell 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JetBlue Airways 13. LinkedIn 14. Lyft 15. Mastercard 16. Microsoft 17. MongoDB 18. Netflix 19. Nvidia 20. Oracle 21. PayPal 22. Pinterest 23. Qualcomm 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. SAP 27. Spotify 28. Square 29. TMobile 30. Twitter 31. Uber 32. VMware
Find out what your peers are saying about Nagios XI vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.