Nagios XI Reviews

For monitoring HFC network from the headend to end-of-line, mainly power supplies (transponders).

Integrating events and performance data between multi-vendor network elements and management systems.

All of them, but mainly: 

• Highly-efficient server performance monitoring engine
• Configuration wizards
• Infrastructure management
• Configuration snapshot.

• Developing a tool for KPIs and KQIs
• WebUI should be improved (visual aspect) and should incorporate non-relational databases.

BPI: It allows defining peripherals to map business criticality for efficient monitoring, as required.

Allows for monitoring of all the different portfolios in an infrastructure, as well as the application/databases.

The product uses the backend as Perl and could be modified to a more lightweight solution like what's being offered by other vendors.

Three to four years.

If you are monitoring network devices, often it's not scaled for large corporations. Definitely, a minus in that area.

Not an issue, but more of adding additional nodes to handle a large number of devices.

It's based on a forum. It allows us to get help from support as well as from other clients who may have knowledge.

Cost was a big factor, but also compatibility of various legacy OSs which still can be managed by Nagios far better than anyone else as an open source.

Defining the requirements are always a given until you get a hang of the product, and we were no exception.

Definitely if some of the complexity and shortcomings are addressed, it has great potential for being a market leader. The open source version could be better incorporated with the general convention similar to Fedora going into Red Hat.

HPE Operations Manager.

Plan ahead based on your infrastructure and application as it would apply to all segments.

Network monitoring and topology: Network monitoring and topology are important for my job rules, because I'm a system and network administrator. I need to have information in real-time about the topology of the network and monitoring of the switches, routers, and servers.

Nagios XI helped me to draw the network and check for system failures.

The Configuration Wizard needs improvement, because not all vendors are present.

About 1 year.

No.

No.

• The integration with the alerting software 
• Automated maintenance windows 
• The ability to set up templates and groups of checks, as well as customize the checks themselves.

We receive alerts for services and servers experiencing problems throughout the day and night, so we can maintain 24/7 monitoring.

Improve the documentation, examples, and best practices, therefore users can understand how to do things. Luckily, I had someone teach me the ropes, but to newcomers without someone to train them, it would be very difficult to learn.

Around two years.

Generally, it is very stable platform. Occasionally, we have to restart the monitoring engine, but it is very easy to do.

Adding new servers and passive checks (which require setting up agents and NRDS) on servers are a little difficult to do properly when employees don't understand the process. Since documentation is lacking, it's a matter of trial and error before things work properly. So yes, scalability could be improved.

We did not purchase support, therefore building the entire platform in-house. This has probably led to us not using best practices.

It's generally good, but lacks documentation.

Since this is an open source technology, if we are capable of writing the plugins in any scripting language, this product allows us to monitor anything we want.

Since my organization has many companies in the form of customers for handling their infrastructure and application, we used to use the paid tool before. However, the open source technology is the best thing for an organization in today's world. When it comes to monitoring Nagios, it is the first choice in open source tools. We started using the Nagios XI for monitoring and it also has a feature for handling events, which we can use to integrate for creating tickets with any ticketing tool using its API.

Nagios XI can improve its GUI for users with a new look. Otherwise, we could develop it on our own. This is the reason I think most users don't prefer it, but technically it is a very strong tool.

Four years.

No. Its new releases come from time to time. Also, if you don't have much expertise, you can opt for its support, but it's a paid service.

An eight out of 10, because technical support always has room for improvement.

Yes, we used a paid monitoring tool and used to pay a lot of money. Nagios saves a lot of money for the company.

Nagios is straightforward and simple. It has very good documentation as well as a very active forum, too.

If you can build a Nagios with add-ons, you can use Nagios without any pricing and licensing. Also Nagios XI does not charge much as compared to other monitoring tools. It is best in terms of pricing, too. I would suggest that if you have expertise, you should go for Nagios and build a Nagios XI type monitoring system without any license or pricing.

Nope, but I know the other monitoring tools which are paid as well as the open source. I like Nagios in comparison to them.

Enjoy Nagios. No need of advice. This is very good product. Just use it and experience it.

Nagios is the best monitoring tool that I have ever worked on. You will never like it if you compare it with other paid tools based on the graphical interface or any other features. Nagios is the best open source tool. We can create a plugin by ourselves and actually monitor whatever we want.

Nagios XI is a Nagios, which is flavored with some features and we have to pay for it. If we use Nagios, we can build ourselves the Nagios XI feature on our own using the add-ons.

The main characteristic I adore is the open source character of it. You want to monitor a specific metric that nobody else has? You can do it even with the most basic of scripting skills, and you can always share it with the vast community of Nagios Exchange.

Like any monitoring tool, it gave me insight into multiple infrastructures I've been a part of, without any limitation (due to the open-source character that I referred to above).

It's more what I personally don't like, rather than what areas need improvement. For example, 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.

I've been using Nagios since about 2005. I've seen the development path through the open-source version (and some other forks of it like Icinga and OMD) but for the last four years I've been entirely using the XI branch.

On older versions I had some minor issues. Currently, to be honest, it is as stable as I could hope for a monitoring tool.

Up to now, the infrastructures I've been a part of were not so large, up to 200 hosts and 1300 services. Even for XI which uses MySQL on the back end, a host with 8GB RAM and four vCPUs is adequate.

With the open source forks, the community is vast and so is the knowledge around the product. Because of this, even though I have a valid commercial support bundle, I have never had the need to use it.

No, I started with Nagios. I've used other apps also like Microsoft SCOM (which is not very good), Zabbix (which is very decent), Tivoli (which is also not very good), HP OpenView (which is vast and requires almost a duplicate infrastructure to run to its full extent), Icinga (a very good clone), Centreon (haven't used it much but it seems solid enough), but I've always ended up using Nagios.

For the latest versions, for me, it is pretty straightforward.

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. Yes, it needs some time to configure and address its issues, but seriously, which monitoring solution does not?

Before going to Nagios XI (commercial, meaning with support), because of the relationship my company had with Microsoft, I evaluated also SCOM. As with Nagios, I went through the whole installation and configuration process. Because of my previous knowledge, I directly compared it with Nagios, and the latter won, hands down.

Be prepared to put some time into it and research it appropriately. If there is an option for consulting services through the support channel, don't be afraid to use it.

Though I downplayed the administrative NCC GUI, this is by far the strongest aspect of the Nagios XI product. In my early days of exposure to Nagios, I was using the Nagios Core product which was configured by manually editing system configuration files and then performing a system configuration verification step. This was a very cumbersome method of configuration of the respective Nagios functions. It was like the old days of software compilers where one would troubleshoot a code set by trial and error, solving source-code issues one error at a time. This was an exacting approach for Nagios system configuration, but very slow.

Nagios XI allows my customer to monitor literally thousands of network and computing endpoints (both hardware and software) in real time, including custom derived SNMP polling and traps. One can even write custom scripts that are embedded as part of the Nagios monitoring footprint.

The product could be optimized to improve the administrative user experience via the Nagios Core Configuration (NCC) GUI module.

I have been immersed in this solution for the past eight months.

The NCC does have issues where it locks up or an admin cannot be sure if the system configuration was exact. I end up saving the system configuration from the Nagios XI native MySQL DB storage paradigm to the old Nagios Core flat file paradigm to confirm proper configuration of the Nagios system.

The new Nagios XI product has been designed from the ground up to support a highly scaleable paradigm.

In general, tech support is available as needed but it is not inexpensive. Response times are generally within 24 hours, but there are times when this is not the case.

I originally used the Nagios Core solution (first one out of the gate many years ago) which had no GUI for system configuration. One had to manually edit system configuration files to customize the Nagios system for specific functional needs.

Configuring the Nagios engine is not a trivial task. Functional components build on top of each other as one defines the system configuration. One has to define the atomic components and then build moiré complex functions on top of those atomic components. This is cumbersome, but it also gives a system designer much flexibility in customizing their own solution.

Considering I come from the software engineering world, it reminds me of the power of the original C software compiler, where respective language easily enabled one to flip individual bits in a data stream. Today’s software compilers are much more simple and one can build high-level projects much quicker, but they do not provide easy access to low-level “bit-flipping” tricks. This is my opinion of the older Nagios Core product versus the newer Nagios XI product.

I recommend that my customer start at the low end of the cost spectrum to determine if a Nagios solution is a good fit for their organization. That customer can then grow into the higher-priced scale as they learn how to utilize the features for Nagios XI.

I am familiar with other pricey pay-for network monitoring solutions. The Nagios Core solution is an open source and free product and allows customers to get their feet wet without doling out tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars for a product they may not like. The pay-for solutions provide ample customer support, but if one is willing to pull up a chair and learn the Nagios solution from the ground up, it is well worth the time, versus extensive dollars, investment. And Nagios is highly customizable by the end-user.

As I stated above, I would recommend getting one of the Nagios “for Dummies” configuration books (Nagios: Building Enterprise-Grade Monitoring Infrastructures for Systems and Networks (second edition)) and start with the free/open-source Nagios Core product. Once one gains a basic understanding of said solution they can then graduate up to the Nagios XI Enterprise product for a fraction of the cost of other pay-for network monitoring solutions. By taking this approach one learns the basic building blocks of the Nagios paradigm before being immersed in the Nagios XI Enterprise world. Like I stated previously, the time investment up front is well worth the dollar savings in the end.

The High Availablity feature is the most important. I have not seen Nagios crash during the last three years. The Script Module in Nagios is really easy to use and is really cost efficient.

This solution provides 24/7 monitoring of the IT infrastructure and provides real-time monitoring for the devices, with alerts.

The reporting part should be made simpler. While we can obtain all the reports we need, we always have to create work-arounds to get them.

I have used it for the last three years.

The only issue faced is that after 20K services Nagios starts acting weird, due to the amount of checking it does and the amount of data stored in the database.

No, there is no issue with scalability.

As I am working from Asia, and Nagios is based in America, we face the issue of time zones. But overall, trouble shooting and support from the Nagios technical team is superb.

I have worked on various tools in past like Spiceworks, Idera, and ManageEngine. We switched to Nagios for lower cost and good performance.

The setup is really easy and can be done by any non-technical person as well. Nagios also provides an OVF for ESXi and VMware, which has everything set up; makes life easy.

The pricing is really cost efficient. The licensing is perpetual and can be renewed very easily.

We evaluated ManageEngine, Solar Winds, Idera and Check_MK.

The over all performance of the product is superb. Just keep in mind during implementation to keep the hardware strong, according to the environment you are monitoring and based on the check Nagios is going to perform.