Nagios Core Reviews

The primary use for this solution is basic network monitoring of a MPLS network.

Nagios Core informs me when my network elements are misfiring.

The most valuable feature is the performance parameters of the system. Nagios Core ill continuous monitor the endpoint for most common parameters on an obsessive mode and that will give you a better insight into the endpoint operating conditions

Please bear in mind that the Core edition is very limited in capability/features unlike the Enterprise XI . Inspite of this limitation it is a fantastic product to use at zero cost

I had deployed Nagios Core to monitor my MPLS network endpoints like routers and switches and also my firewalls and printers

It does a very good job I must say

An analogous product if I may refer to is Spiceworks which is a free tool for IT inventory and does an excellent job of monitoring inventory and reporting on the software etc on the endpoint

The core version is no match for the XI version. But the OEM should consider introducing some of the features of the XI version in the core version so that potential customers are actually compelled to to consider upgrading to the enterprise version

Supremely stable if you right size and maintain the system periodically

My old instance still runs on a Esxi VM with zero support on the hypervisor or the Nagios system its just a 2GB vRAM and single vCPU with about 40 GB storage and handles about 70 odd hosts and runs just fine apart from the log files maintenance its easy

No vendor involvement 

Tried many other similar products all demo versions hence did not take to production

Pretty straightforward to set up and configure basic system

I did it myself so no vendor is involved

Can't say coz my cost of investment is only personal effort , no money so its 100% ROI

Zero cost for the core edition but you need to know linux based apps configuration a=in general but in this case the installation and configuration guides make things a lot easy . A bit of patience and clear thinking you may end up doing a lot more in your setup than you expected !!!!

Tried many other similar products all demo versions hence did not take to production

Definitely try it out if you have zero budget 

Even if you don't have a budget restriction please do give it a try

We use the solution to monitor our IT infrastructure, like servers, the network, and things like that.

I like the way the solution sends alerts and how it keeps on escalating them. I also find
the plugins by which you can easily add the divisions valuable.

I am satisfied, but I think there is a little bit of improvement that can be made.

Lessening the price point would be an improvement.

I would like to see more training videos. It is a vast product and it covers so many areas and so many kinds of devices, so I do understand that it's a challenge when you want some kind of integration, or add a plugin, to always have documentation. But, yeah, as much as possible on the documentation, if it can be done better, that would be good.

If there was more application monitoring, it would be much better.

I find the solution stable. I don't have any complaints in regards to the instability of the product. We have used this product now for quite some time and we are happy with it.

For technical support, I think I would try to rate it somewhere around seven out of ten.

No, this is the first one that we started using. There was nothing that we have to complain about here from the past experience.

The initial setup was actually done by one of the vendors so we were one of the partners who collaborated with this for the installation. We were working together to do the installation and then they handed it over to us and then we took it over from there.

In terms of advice, I'd say that you need to know what the plan is and try to understand from which direction you are going to monitor. And, to understand what additional things you'll probably want to do from your side, like putting in scripts and other kinds of automation. So the planning is everything. If there is a particular tool you want to integrate with those things have to be properly planned beforehand.

With the number of features that it has and the ease of integration, I would rate the solution somewhere close to nine out of ten.

We used Nagios Core to monitor our servers in other countries. Our main server is in Cairo, while we monitor other servers in Germany, which are hosting Jenkins and other web services to make sure that the infrastructure is stable and if anything goes wrong it reports it automatically.

Before using this solution, sometimes Jenkins went down and we didn't know the reason. We eventually discovered that the issue was disc space that exceeded a certain percentage. Now that we have Nagios to monitor the servers, we know if anything goes wrong it can solve the problem before it happens.

The most valuable features to us are the ability to improve memory usage, disc space usage, and the PDU load of each node.

It's not that easy to install the product itself. Also, the UI is a bit hard for regular users to navigate through. In addition, I would appreciate an FNP server for sending emails, which now depends on the resting servers for Nagios Core. If it comes with its own FNP server, it would be much better. Also, if it can be installed in other cores, that would be awesome but right now it only uses Linux.

Alias excavation and configurations from the wall rather than the server itself would be great improvements. Also, general UI enhancements and better UX, user experience.

It's stable because it's a Linux based code, which is very basic. It doesn't have many big features, so it's stable. You can add a node in less than half an hour, I think.

We're only currently using Nagios Core on one to ten servers. In the future, we may add more nodes.

I haven't tried to contact support. I was searching on the support forums, but that was not for me. I tried many solutions from the support forums. One of them is working, but only after a long time.

The initial setup was complex, mainly because it was in Linux and had many packages that we're not used to. I had to install them one by one on the app to configure the complication on the app that was solved to authenticate Nagios on the central app. It comes with regular users in files and in order to authenticate, you have to make a lot of confirmations, using Apache as well as Nagios. This was all very hard, and it took me a week to configure it.

I think deployment took about two weeks at the most. We did the deployment by ourselves. We have two people for deployment and maintenance.

Nagios Core is free to use.

I would rate Nagios Core as seven out of ten because it was hard to configure and the implementation process itself took about two weeks. Also, the UI is not friendly. Other products have features that aren't included in Nagios Core. I think that one was the easiest to restore. Also, Nagios supports only Linux, not A/UX. It can't be installed on the servers. If they supported all of these things, it would be much better.

• Monitoring the critical services and network environment for a large multi-site company. 
• It is also used for troubleshooting issues and capacity planning.

Nagios allows IT staff and end-users to see the status of critical services on the network. It also can alert and notify selected users if critical services fail, reducing the mean time to recover.

Availability of additional plugins like SNMP for instant alerts and PNP4Nagios for graphs make this a powerful solution.

This is the open source product, so it's a toolkit rather than a complete solution. See Nagios XI for a more complete version. 

We use Nagios to monitor hundreds of CentOS cloud servers (and a few Legacy Windows servers). Nagios is monitoring well over 5000 service endpoints. Some plugins were handwritten in PHP, Perl, Python, Java and Bash.

It has made the life of the network operations staff more proactive in managing the resources of the infrastructure. It prevents disasters long before they can take place.

• Historical Alert records/data
• Plugins
• Data sources (MySQL)
• Grouping of services and servers

We use the Alerting and Graphing to minimize the downtime. The old RRD Graph module is now used by Grafana. We outgrew the old PNP4Nagios a few weeks back. 

The GUI of the Core is still a long way off, but the features are 100 percent above average. It would be great to see better UI themes which could be configured by Netadmin or instructions that help combine graphs and Nagios.

I have never had stability issues. Nagios has been stable for over 10 years. Although, we never left it running for more than two weeks without uploading new services, plugins, and threshold changes, then restarting it..

No scalability issues, though it is a bit slow due to latency. However, after tweaking the Nagios and off-loading the graphing to NPCD, I was able to scale the Nagios to more than 5000 services checks with 0.5s latency.

The end-users love quick alerting and Grafana dashboards.

We did not previously use a different solution. Nagios was the first solution that we started using 10 years ago.

Since its Nagios, it is a bit time consuming, but worth the effort. It took a few hours setting up the entire environment, including RRD, PHP, Apache, Nagios, PNP4Nagios, Perl, Python, OpenSSL, etc.

We did an in-house installation.

We have saved a lot of time, money, and effort in reducing disaster times, which is owed to Nagios quick alerting.

The Nagios Core (PNP4Nagios + Core) is free and can be setup by Netadmin within a few hours. The only additional cost is the cloud server. 

10 years ago, there were not too many options.

There are thousands upon thousands of plugins. This is a winning product. Nothing can match the plugins, even I have contributed about six plugins.

It's monitoring all of our production environment and alerting us to any issues that might pop up.

The benefits are that it's free and it allows us to monitor all of our production. So it gives us a comfort level of knowing that if there is a problem that pops up, we get notified.

• GUI interface
• Notification capabilities
• Real-time reporting

In terms of any further features, that would bump us into their paid product. For what we get and what we use, and all the libraries that are available, it's pretty robust.

However, for the version we're using, making it a little easier to configure and set up from the start would help. There are multiple layers that you have to wade through to be able to set it up, to do it the right way, and to get it to do what you want it to do.

It has been rock solid.

So far, it has met our needs. As far as I know, from reading blogs and the like, it can go to many more servers and even multiple data centers. It seems like it's pretty scalable.

Tech support has been pretty good. There have been a couple of occasions where we've had to pick up the phone and call, and for the most part, they are very prompt, very quick, very responsive.

I had used this solution before and there wasn't anything in place here that was any good, so it was a no-brainer for me.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• flexibility
• supportability
• scalability.

I set the whole thing up. It wasn't complex, it was just that I had to do a lot of planning. If you follow your plan then you won't end up in trouble. If you deviate from the plan, you are going to have trouble.

We have the ability right now to see and create reports to tell whether or not we're meeting our SLAs on our production servers, through it. That is something that we wrote and implemented as a plug-in.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10 because it's relatively easy to implement and the cost is great, it's free.

My advice would be, save yourself a lot of time - go get it and install it.

The poller is really good, I can easily implement new stuff and it is scalable.

Monitoring is the most important thing to avoid any production issue. It's important to get some alerts on the server and network devices. It's the day-to-day management to avoid any production issues.

I have used Nagios with the Adagios interface for two years.

I have not yet encountered any issues with deployment, stability or scalability.

I used Centreon/Nagios for eight years before I chose Nagios with the Adagios interface to simplify day-to-day configuration.

Implementation requires knowledge on the production.

There is no license cost, just a cost in time.

There is a large Nagios community for new sensors, etc.

The most valuable features of this product are the very lightweight code and easy-to-manage plug-ins.

Apart from the main Nagios core engine, one can add several APIs and add-ons to make the Nagios engine more stronger without compromising it's performance.

Each config parameter can be easily tuned as per individual's need. Many proven frontends are available to get performance related output from the Nagios engine.

Also, Nagios can work without any database back end. It generates a single file for each day and maintains it in a separate directory until a Linux System Admin removes it manually. In Nagios terms, it is called archiving. When someone wants an availability report for a particular server for the last year, Nagios simply fetches all of the relevant files and outputs the data within the shortest period of time. There is no need to query any database to get historical data, which puts extra burden on CPU and memory.

Using Nagios, I'm managing more than 1000 services, which involves the following operating nodes:

• IBM AIX
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• HP-Unix
• Windows enterprise-grade OS
• Cisco router/switches
• FortiGate and WatchGuard firewalls
• APC UPS systems
• Many more...

The majority of the above nodes support SNMP v1/2, thru which one needs to tune up the monitoring plug-in as needed.

Considering my utilization of Nagios on a daily basis, it would be really great if Nagios can concentrate on the following areas of improvement:

• Custom availability report and export as PDF
• Nagios SLA. I'm currently working on Nagios Digger, which has many code-level problems. In my present configuration, I've observed PHP level coding issues. I'm able to fetch all Nagios data into the Nagios Digger database (mariadb in rhel7) successfully, but found difficulties fetching and replicating it into the PHP front end. I've already contacted its author and coordination is in progress to make it available for the community.
• SMS tool integration with Nagios

I have been using Nagios for more than five years.

In Nagios Core, I haven't had any minor problems in terms of stability. If any did arise, I never knew about it....!!!

I require less customer service because I am using an open source product. But, sincere thanks to the Nagios community for providing excellent and prompt support as and when required.

Initial setup was very straightforward. Just check the official Nagios website (www.nagios.org) for installation instructions.

If a person has basic or in-depth level knowledge of all required network/server equipment, than he/she can easily implement Nagios.

Also, it is advisable to have proper knowledge of SNMP v1/2/3 with Nagios agents for Windows and Unix-like OS.

I started learning and configuring out data centre monitoring system by using Zabbix and openNMS. But, finally I selected Nagios due to its very large user community and maximum tunable parameters.