Nagios Core Reviews

Alerting and proactive monitoring are invaluable. It also allows you to write your own plugin if you have no alternatives and you need to have things under control.

It sends alerts to the right people which ensures there is no delay in the correct person or team looking into issues. It's helped to reduce downtime in the production environment to almost zero. Due to this, we now spend less time on network or server administration.

Sometimes we have had downtimes because of stupid problems such as a service suddenly stopping without any reason, or a SQL server datababase or logs growing too big, and too fast, network devices failure etc. With Nagios, this has been reduced.

The configuration and reporting modules need to be improved. I'd like to have them include a basic install package, and if you don't like the packages included, have the ability to can replace them with different ones from the Nagios plug-in site.

I've been using it for six years, and we're currently planning to upgrade it.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

I'm running Nagios with CentOS 5 on one server with no problems. I'm going to update the server because of plugin requirements.

I've not had to scale it.

This was our first monitoring solution. We were looking for a way to monitor IT structure as some years ago we began deploying a few servers and switches. Over the years, computers have spread everywhere into our offices and factory, so we needed a way to check for systems/network availability 24x7. Nagios Core was a good solution to start with.

I read the manual, set up a test server, and performed some tests. After our initial setup, I then added more servers and any IP device on our network that had SNP support (switches, sensors, printers and so on). It was my first time working with a Unix environment, and it didn't take so much time to set it up.

I did it myself.

There's no licensing costs, and I feel that monitoring is not essential software for a management board, at least until bad things happen then it becomes invaluable.

Take your time to understand how it works. Then start monitoring a small number of assets in your department and then add some device/server every day. It takes some time to tune all your checks. Once done you'll have almost everything under control. I even managed to adapt some plugins to suit my needs.

Nagios is a good choice for network monitoring. It's up to you decide if you need assistance of skilled people or try it by yourself. I was curious about Linux and Nagios was a good reason to start working with it.

It is stable and fit for purpose. Various plugins are available as per your need in the open source marketplace to use and customize according to the need.

We use other enterprise products for most monitoring activities. However, Nagios has been the product to go to if we need a cost effective solution that can directly fit our needs. We use it in our business operations center to view dashboards (i.e. it provides a Google map view) of critical systems within stores.

Setup is bit complicated due to the large set of libraries it needs, but this may be because it's open source.

We use only Nagios Core.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

Stability wise it just works without any major maintenance.

It's highly scalable and will scale according to your needs.

It is an open source tool which provides capability to customize it according to the needs. So internally you need to have expertise to consume its servers unless you go for the paid options.

You should be sure that you have the expertise to customize it, and I would recommend the paid-for Nagios XI for the additional support.

This is a fit for purpose product which means that if you have a definite list of requirements and are not willing, or unable, to spend money on big enterprise tools, then Nagios is a tool to go to. Also, any changes to the customization means that you need to have the skill sets internally within the organisation to effectively use it. Otherwise it's a great open source product.

We like the automatic alerting functions. Also, there are a lot of free monitoring modules available for any purpose you may need.

We've got a medium size distributed system with a lot of locally installed machines, and Nagios provides us with a solid and reliable monitoring solution for these machines.

They should simplify the features so it becomes easier to setup out of the box.

I've been using it for about five years.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Nagios was our first solution. At the time, we read that Nagios was the industry standard solution, so we chose it.

It is a complex software with many-many features, so the setup not an easy task.

We did it in-house.

We are using the free version.

The free version is good enough for most people, but it is somewhat hard to make it a working solution.

Gathering data from various machines easily without worrying about the underlying OS or technology.

We can get real time statistics of our servers which improves our monitoring. The integration of Nagios with other tools makes our monitoring way better than what we previously had in place.

It would be nice if it was hosted in cloud. Also, they need to improve the graphs.

I've been using it for four years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I haven't had the need to use technical support.

This is our first infrastructure monitoring tool.

It was straightforward.

We did it in-house. There is no extra effort needed if you just go through the regular installation instructions.

We are using the free version.

You should go ahead and try it.

Extensibility is good as this makes it easy to write checks on your own. Also, it's light as since v4 it isn't resource heavy.

No IT company would survive without a monitoring system. Nagios helped the companies I've worked with to achieve an acceptable level of monitoring.

Nagios was not built with scalability in mind. It does not work in a distributed fashion, and fixing this issue would probably require rewriting a big chunk of its code. There are other solutions, born as a fork of Nagios, that do this but it would be great if Nagios could do it.

I've been using it for five years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It does not scale horizontally. We had to wrote our own web interface and puppetry to manage/view all the hosts managed by various, indipendent Nagios hosts.

It's very easy to install Nagios as its package is provided by many Linux distributions and there are plenty of documentation online.

Don't use it. If Nagios is what you already have, you can try keep using it. If you're starting from scratch, there are products that scale better and perform better, and they use the same plugin syntax as they were initially Nagios forks.

Getting the alerts is the most valuable feature. This way I know when servers are acting up or just plainhosed. It also helps me to know which things need to be recovered and when so I do not have to bother with checking into it immediately.

Before we implemented Nagios, we did not know which servers were up or down until a customer told us. Now, I can see trends over time and it gives me perspective of what needs to be improved and we are able to work proactively as opposed to reactively.

Generally, it does what I need it to do, but better error reporting would be great. It's so flexible that I do not use half the capability that it has. Also, Nagios 4 does not work with NConf or Adagios so we haven't upgraded yet.

I have worked with it as a monitoring and alerting solution for 10 years accross two jobs.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

We are monitoring under 200 devices and less than 1200 services so I do not need this availability yet.

I've never needed to contact the vendor as I have always found my answers via the documentation and Google searches.

I have used Zabix and Big Brother, but neither was as workable as Nagios.

Setup is not for the GUI lover as it requires you to perform a lot of CLI work.

You do not need a vendor. I have always deployed it myself.

It's free.

I have looked at other solutions but none are as simple, and I would hate to have to learn another system.

It's well worth it to ensure your up time and to catch the bigger issues.

Generally, it's an open source software, so it's free, and despite this, it covers all infrastructure health issues.

This product covers all of our infrastructure health checks, and has triggers for us to alert us to any unusual behaviour of the monitored systems. It alerts us before our customer is even aware of an issue and we can always fix it before they notice it. We can easily generate any type of notification that we went, and integrate it with other tools using any REST API which is a simple to do.

I would like to see a much better Nagios Manager GUI that can support all type of configuration items, and advance search options. They should develop a way to avoid restarting the entire application upon making any change, enable parallel checks, and improve SNMP support for SNMP traps.

I've used it for around 10 years

We had no deployment issues.

The product is quite stable, but it needs to be able to support larger amounts of hosts/services checks.

There's been no issues having it monitor our entire infrastructure.

I'm not using any customer service.

I'm not in need of any technical support.

I started with this product.

It was quite straightforward, but I would love to see an RPM package that includes all needed package dependencies.

We used an in-house team. I would advise you to learn from users past experience as it always helps.

Use the Nagios community, and go for the basic product. Design your system configuration before installing the product.

The Auto Inventory is valuable.

Automatic monitoring of any new server added to the organization.

A better UI for graphing would make it better. The present graphs are not very friendly and good to see. 

I've been using it for two years.

I needed to add a tweak to make the monitoring work. 

There have been no issues with the stability.

We have had no scaling issues.

It was a little complex.

I implemented it all by myself. 

Its free. I have not used the Enterprise version. 

I evaluated Zabbix, but found Nagios better for my needs due to its simplicity and one dashboard for all servers.

Its an awesome product to use. 100% recommended for all organizations.