Nagios XI Reviews

Nagios XI is used for monitoring the resources in the infrastructure.

The dashboard allows you to see what's going on in the overall system.

As it is open-source, it is not user-friendly. Open-source software is usually not user-friendly.

We have been selling Nagios XI for more than five years.

Nagios XI is a scalable product.

We have six customers who are using this solution.

Support, we have a time zone issue, but we are providing our own support.

I don't believe we require anything, because we have our own technical expertise.

We are resellers of Forcepoint and Symantec DLP.

Because my company is experienced, installation is not a problem for us, but I'm not sure about new users.

We have a team of two or three people to deploy and maintain this solution.

Nagios XI is open source.

It requires a yearly license.

It is an alternative to more expensive solutions. That is why they use Nagios.

I would rate Nagios XI an eight out of ten.

I use Nagios to monitor LTE modems. We have more than 24,000 modems on a single instance of Nagios.

We also use this software to monitor several KPIs regarding to CPE devices, and items in our IT department infrastructure when we started eight years ago.

We use plugins provided by Nagios XI to monitor our infrastructure equipment, OS, Databases and Services from easy to use wizards in monitoring panel. Also, we add some additional features to this monitoring system based on our organization needs. 

Nagios is stable and it's easy to use the monitoring software, which is why we chose this product. There is no limitation exist to monitor every measurable parameters and KPIs. Every known devices and services parameters has own plugins in this monitoring system and for special cases, it`s possible to write script and monitor results.

1. Reporting items needs more improvement and need to be more flexible based on customer needs

2. Clustering feature need to be implemented for large environment. Some solutions introduced in official website such as Mod-Gearman and Nagios Fusion but the first one implemented by third party and second one is not include management control and just a central view from several instances. I think Nagios should implement an official solution for clustering for enterprise and large scales that should be included database solution as well. 

I have eight years of experience working with Nagios XI. I have a lot of experience using this monitoring software.

We are using the latest version.

It's a stable solution. We have not had any issues.

We have more than 100 users and plan to continue to use this solution.

We don't have technical support for Nagios because we are living in Iran and we have embargoes, so we cannot use the technical support from Nagios. We use local support.

I use Solarwinds and CACTI before using Nagios but both of them has some concerns.

We cannot add any feature to Solarwinds because it is none open source

CACTI is graphing tool and it cannot help us to alerting issues. Some plugins are implemented for this purpose for CACTI such as Thold plugin but it has not complete feature such as Nagios. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to install, but you need some information about the Linux operating system.

It took less than one hour to deploy.

I completed the implementation myself.

We have a team of three engineers to maintain this solution.

Nagios Core does not have any payment, but Nagios XI requires payment for the license and support.

Solarwinds

CACTI

PRTG

For anyone who is interested in using this solution, I would recommend it. This monitoring software is easy to use and is very powerful. 

This monitoring system has a powerful engine. I have many devices being monitored by a single instance, and it can show that this software works well.

I would rate Nagios XI an eight out of ten.

Nagios is our cloud-based monitoring system. We need to deploy it and integrate with our CRM, customer portal and the ticketing system as an end to end customer support platform. We use it for monitoring and gathering data from our customer service equipment.

We have more than 100 people using the solution and 3 people to do the maintenance.

Nagios XI has a custom API feature, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature.

In fact, Nagios XI grant access to administrator to use official common backend commands and callback functions developed by Nagios in custom APIs, so custom APIs could be created as an standard web services without degradation in performance and access to needed data easily. This APIs will be registered and listed in Component Management and administrator could be able to manage them as well. Also, Authentication will be done by creating unique Token for each user created in Nagios XI User Management automatically and it could be used in calling each APIs to manage access level of caller user.

All documentation and examples about creating custom APIs are available in "Help" tab in monitoring GUI and each person with moderate level of knowledge about development in PHP language  (Needless to say it required admin privilege), can create this kind of web services. 

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. Some products such as Zabbix have a software monitoring system built-in, such as the Prometheus monitoring system. It can use the features to monitor cloud systems. This would be a useful feature to include in Nagios XI. Nagios has some plugins to monitor clouding systems, but this feature on Zabbix is so handy and so user-friendly. I think it can be added to the Nagios monitoring system.

Nagios is stable, but we are using mod-Gearman for distributing the solution. There is network limitation on this, such that if the network is not stable, the whole solution is also, not stable.

Because we are working in Iran, we have embargoes, and this means we don't have any support from Nagios support. As a result, we have to use self-study. We research using Google and nagios forum this has helped us to resolve our issues.

Set up in Nagios is complex. However, it's okay once you have done this task a few times, so you understand the logic. Once you have done that, it is easy to use.

We also compared the product to Zabbix.

I would recommend this solution because it's so powerful with no limitation, especially when using the XI version. I would rate Nagios 8 out of 10. Overall, I find it to be a very good solution.

We primarily use this solution to monitor servers and services.

The features I've found the most useful are the plug-ins, the fact that you can connect almost everything to it. That's very useful.

There's room for improvement in the visibility, and in the ability to extract information. Stuff like this should be more simple. Going over the data and the information is complicated at the moment. The management of the commands is also a little complicated.

It's stable.

I haven't had any experience with technical support.

The initial setup was straightforward.

In regards to the interface, obviously it can always get even better but at the moment it's functional. It's a good tool. It's very easy to use, very straightforward, and I would recommend it. I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. I like it but of course, it could be better. The product detail should look better, and again, being able to find information on the search is not good enough. I think to change that would improve it very much.

We use the solution in order to collect large amounts of data to monitor our network, switches, and firewall.

It provides an easy and powerful solution to network monitoring so I can pay attention to other concerns.

The most valuable feature is the setup wizard. The wizard just asks you for simple details and automatically starts collecting logs. It will give you some hints to configure your login on remote devices.

For enterprise users, the product would be better if it came with dedicated plugins. It has an online store for plugins and additional features, but most of the plugins we have are mostly open source. These open source plugins do not have a lot of documentation. We have to try to figure out how to use them on our own. They have good documentation for their own products and because of that, we have details to easily use their product as they have a guide. There is no documentation on the plugin site. They need more documentation for the plugins.

Besides that, there's nothing more that I would add as the product covers my current needs. Maybe I would like a lower price. That is maybe a problem they could fix.

We have absolutely no problem with the stability of the solution. I have no problem with the system or the setup. I want to do more to master the system and harness its capability, but that is my limitation.

Technical support is very good but is very expensive. It is becoming more and more expensive just like the upgrade. The incredibly high prices are a very bad move on their part. I know everything is got to go up but this seems too much at a time. They also have some requirements for the support licensing that is very complicated. You have to have a password and you pay for a limited number of calls. For the price they are selling it, It should be okay to call them anytime.

The setup was very straightforward. We did not have to create a complicated strategy. We just installed the server and add the devices that were most urgent for me to monitor. I just added the devices and it was as simple as that.

We implemented it on our own in a very short period of time.

The license and support are very expensive. You pay separately for each and the licensing is a little complicated. With a company like Cisco which may be expensive, the support is included. This product costs more than even Cisco. The support is not as easy to contact.

It is hard not to consider other solutions now because of the advice of other CIOs and their experience with open source products that save them a lot of money. It may not always save time because they can be more difficult to use. That can be a trade-off.

The price of the licensing is very high, even for a big company. There are good open source products in the market that we could use for free and other companies I know are using them because of the price. Mostly because of the price of the product and the cost of tech support, I would rate this an eight out of ten. The product itself is very good.

We use this solution for the monitoring of network devices in multiple areas. I use this solution on a daily basis, and the first thing that I do when I go into the workplace each morning is to check on all of the equipment.

This solution has improved our ability to determine the source of a connection failure in our network. Prior to using Nagios XI, we did not know whether the drop in service was a result of our system, or whether it was the fault of our service provider. Now, we are able to monitor the service provider's router and make that determination.

The most valuable feature is its support for different types of devices, where it can use all of the equipment that you need. You can find and change your speed in the network topology, and if something goes down then it will be noticed immediately.

I would like to see more customization in the network map because it is a bit tricky to use it.

First, when you click on one of the devices on the map, it shows you information about the equipment. Sometimes, there is information that I do not want to show. I would instead like to choose what is shown.

Next, I would like to have the ability to show only a subset of equipment on the network map. When you view it, all of the equipment that you have is there, every time. Sometimes, I would like to choose just a group of devices to view.

This is a stable solution. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the stability a nine.

The scalability is perfect. I can add as much equipment as I like.

I have not needed to contact technical support. Everything installed easily and it works fine.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The deployment took approximately one hour. The difficult part is configuring the equipment, such as setting up the IP addresses. Because I have more than fifty devices, it took me some time. The task is simple, albeit repetitive.

The licensing fees for this solution are approximately $3,000 USD per year.

When I was researching solutions I read about Nagios XI, and it was rated as one of the best solutions. I tried it and I liked it, which is why it was selected.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

This solution is being used to monitor hundreds of servers at startup. It checks disk usage, services, memory usage, and more.  

It has improved the task of network monitoring.

The most valuable feature is the dashboard, where I can have a single screen that provides a summary for hundreds of servers. I get red and green indicators that help me to quickly check for and rectify problems.

When you monitor a lot of things it creates a lot of events and logs. I would like a much easier GUI so that I can delete events and logs, which will free up a lot of space. I would also like a better GUI for dashboard viewing.

A better interface would allow this solution to be used as a single point of monitoring.

When the database is in need of repair, perhaps due to corruption caused by an improper shutdown, then it should happen automatically, rather than having to run a command.

The stability of this solution is quite good.

If the machine crashes and it goes down, without properly shutting down the virtual machine, then I get an error that requires the database to be repaired.

There are four or five people that browse the dashboard.

I dealt with technical support for a few months, but because I do not have a support contract I have not used it in several years. A support contract can be purchased separately.

If problems arise then you are able to fix things on your own. If you can't, then just leave it.

I am also using KS-Soft Advanced HostMonitor, but only for monitoring the up or down status of the machines. It has a much better icon view of the dashboard. When our customer wants to look at their data center and see the status of all branches and all servers, it shows a much better, color-coded graphical form. I am in the process of purchasing additional licenses for HostMonitor so that I can have multiple dashboards running from a single machine.

I did not switch solutions, but I am always open to products that offer a better user interface.

The initial setup for this solution is quite easy. I am running it on a VM platform.

The deployment happens over time as the environment changes, but the initial deployment took one or two days. For the server to monitor, you just have to set the SNMP and add it onto the Nagios platform. As more servers are added, you add them to the platform.

We took care of the implementation in-house. One person is sufficient for deployment and maintenance.

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.

I am using the original version of the software that I purchased because I do not have a support contract. This means that I have not received support or updates in several years.

While this solution works, I think that it can be improved in terms of maintenance, support, and price.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We use this solution for monitoring the status of our hard drives, as well as bandwidth utilization. Essentially, we monitor all of the necessary statuses for our servers.

This solution is very good for monitoring infrastructure. It is simply to use, and you can receive notifications by email.

This solution would be improved with the inclusion of additional services. Monitoring streaming services is an example of something that is not currently supported, so in order to handle this, I would have to write a script. Scripts like this should be included in the next version of the solution.

I would like to see support for notification via SMS. 

The solution is very stable, although sometimes we have had problems with the database in cases where we had a large number of roles and services. There have been cases of database corruption that had to be repaired.

Scalability is very good, and I have no problem with it. The configuration is such that you can add hosts or monitoring services very easily.

We have four security administrators who use this system.

I have not needed to contact technical support. There are webinars and other information available that I have made use of. If you have a problem then you can copy and paste the error into a search engine and find the solution easily.

I have used other solutions from vendors such as McAfee, but Nagios XI is the best solution when compared with others.

I feel that the initial setup is difficult for a beginner. You must be skilled at using the Linux operating system to install and start up the solution.

I performed the installation myself, learning about it from a webinar that was available online.

I am in the process of testing a large number of solutions, and this is the best one.

This is a very good solution and it is simple to use, for any company. It is also very stable and you can monitor a large number of services with no problem. You can also create many users and have them receive notification by email. It's very good.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.