Nagios XI Reviews and Pricing

Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Jun 7, 2016

It helps you get the best optimization in a non-local datacenters, or remote servers on subnetworks.

What is most valuable?

Nagios enables you to choose to have either a single server structure or multi server net. This helps you get the best optimization in a non-local datacenters, or remote servers on subnetworks.

How has it helped my organization?

I once worked on a project for a consortium in a mixed setting with Windows and Linux machines. We have integrated Nagios servers in each of the 120 head offices with different specifications. It is used for the monitoring of more than 1300 servers and 16000 clients with different sub-networks and many different applications in a closed environment. The servers of their head offices were configured to propagate the data to the primary Nagios server of the main control center, and to this mirror in the operative center and to the mirror it in the disaster recovery center.

What needs improvement?

They need to develop a better integration with a common ticketing system will be great. Once I built a complete integration with OTRS:ITSM and Nagios using the Samba LDAP database as the registry for user and machines in the software. It was a complex setup, but functional and could probably work in an Active Directory environment as well, but a fully-functional bidirectional bridge engine will be great. Nagios Enterprise has Nagios Incident Manager software but sometimes you need to work on preexisting systems with strong customizations.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We have had no issues with the deployment.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There have been no performance issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's been able to scale for our needs.

What other advice do I have?

Nagios is the best software of its kind if you have time for configure any host and network, and you can do quite everything with a bit of scripting. It is well documented, scalable and modular, as well as being good for a small business and for an enterprise environment. Take your time to study the product and test the agents first; be very careful on the traffic generated by agents and server-to-server communication.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user3870

Senior Manager of Engineering with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 22, 2013

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The best monitoring system for any small/medium size network

Valuable Features:

Nagios can be installed on a server with very low specifications, our main server has 512 MB RAM and 1 processor.As the open source version does not provide a configuration interface, for those who need easy administration of Hosts and services - it can be integrated into other web applications such as NagiosQL (Personal favourite) with a database back-end to store configuration in the case of failure.There are many plugins we use on our desktops such as Nagstatus and Nagstatmon which provide us with real time monitoring results instead of sending out E-Mail alerts, Instant messages etc.We currently monitor all our servers using SNMP just to avoid installing apps like NSClient to keep monitoring simple and clean.

Room for Improvement:

The Installation can get very difficult depending on what Linux flavour you are using. The open source version does not provide a configuration web interface. Some scripting knowledge is required in order to make changes to configuration files. Nagios is my favourite open source monitoring system. I just love it! It took me a while to properly configure Nagios to monitor our internal systems. Once we realised its potential we decided to setup remote polling on client systems, to have a central location for monitoring. (Using Centreon)As it is open source we were able to customise everything, from check commands, modifying the web interfaces, integrating into CMDBs such as iTop. When comparing Nagios to other monitoring systems it stands out by far.

Other Advice:

If you are new to Nagios I recommend that you watch videos/read documentation before you start to mess around with the code. One little mistake can stop Nagios from monitoring your systems, so make sure that you always backup your configuration!

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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Nagios XI

May 2025

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Learn what your peers think about Nagios XI. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.

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Hattab Mahdi

Assistant Director at unpa

Apr 2, 2017

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Provides SMS and e-mail alerts.

What is most valuable?

Alerting with SMS and e-mail
Monitoring services on hardware status

How has it helped my organization?

It improves the time to resolve incidents and administration of the system.

What needs improvement?

Improve the time to resolve incidents.

Improve the KPIs for availability.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

I have been using it since 2010.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There are stability issues if you have a large number of hosts and services.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There are scalability issues if you have a large number of hosts and services.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Customer service is good.

Technical Support:

Technical support is the best.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not previously use a different solution.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup is complex.

What about the implementation team?

I'm an expert for this solution.

What was our ROI?

The ROI is very good.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I'm using the open source version.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

What other advice do I have?

It's the best solution for enterprise PME.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user789057-- at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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Dec 14, 2017

Check www.cannyinfotech.com to avoid any SMS Scam

it_user67761

IT Administrator at a media company with 10,001+ employees

Oct 30, 2013

Nagios for IT Infrastructure Monitoring

I managed a web design and hosting company several years ago. When we began to experience the first of many growth spurts, we were adding servers to our infrastructure at a rate of one to three servers per quarter. Knowing the details about what was happening on all of those servers, as well as the applications and infrastructure in general, quickly became my primary concern and responsibility.

I consulted with the Datacenter staff and other hosting professionals regarding server monitoring, and the application most recommended was Nagios. But along with the recommendation, came the warnings that Nagios might be a pain in the ass to setup and maintain. Back then, when Nagios was in its infancy, the warnings were quite appropriate! But the flexibility that it offered and the intelligence that it returned made editing the countless configuration files well worth it! Today there are many books and videos that explain Nagios' installation and configuration in detail, and self-paced training is available by subscription for only $200 per year.

Nagios streamlines the overall monitoring of Ping, Power and Pipe, while paying specific attention to areas like: CPU, Memory, Disks, SNMP Service, Network Switches, Routers, Firewalls, Services, DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, Exchange Services, HTTP Status, FTP Status, OpenManage Status, Total Running Processes, Programs running on servers and other host resources and application states.

The system can be extended with customized host and service checks. It includes e-mail, pager, and other notification features, and a web interface streamlines access to network status, problem history, and log information.

Nagios is a Linux platform product. Nagios Enterprise also provides clients with open source Nagios development, customization, integration, and optimization services. Originally created under the name NetSaint, the Nagios application was written and is currently maintained by Ethan Galstad, along with a group of developers actively maintaining both official and unofficial plugins.

Nagios Key Strengths

Nagios is a popular open source network monitoring software application. It watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong and again when they get better.
Nagios is the industry standard in enterprise-class monitoring for good reason. It allows you to gain insight into your network and infrastructure and fix problems before customers know they even exist. It’s stable, scalable, supported, and extensible.
In many data center environments, Nagios has become the de facto standard for companies in need of an open source, fault-tolerant solution to monitor single points of failure, service-level agreement (SLA) shortcomings, servers, redundant communication connections or environmental factors.
Nagios has been downloaded more than 660,000 times since 2001. More than any other application, the Nagios open source components are in use by more than 50 open source customers—and the number is rapidly growing. A powerful and flexible monitoring tool, Nagios has nearly limitless configuration options, making installation and configuration a dynamic, robust proposition for systems administrators.
Nagios Enterprise offers professional support services for Nagios. Working in combination with its partners, Nagios can provide you and your organization with access to a variety of support options for Nagios, including Installation support, Incident-based support, 24×7 support contracts, and Customized support plans.

Software Highlights

Supports Comprehensive Network Monitoring for Windows, Linux/Unix, routers, switches, firewalls, printers, services, and applications.
Gives you Immediate awareness and insight, letting you receive immediate notifications of problems via email, pager and cell phone.
Provides problem remediation that lets you acknowledge problems through web interface and automatically restart failed applications.
Supports proactive planning, letting you schedule downtime for anticipated host, service, and network upgrades.
Offers robust reporting options, including SLA availability reports, alert and notification history reports, and trending analysis.
Offers multi-tenant/multi-user capabilities, multiple users can access the web interface.
Provides smooth, easy integration with your existing applications.
Delivers a stable, reliable, and respected platform.

We live in a “plug & play” world where people expect instant results. Nagios is not a “plug & play” application. Every Data Center is different. We have volumes of “Best Practices” to guide us in the design and management of our facilities. The shear diversity of devices and applications that make up our ever changing Infrastructure requires an application with a great deal of flexibility if it is to succeed at monitoring and reporting on the status of everything in our environments.

“Those who fail to plan, plan to fail” Nagios is not difficult to install. It is not difficult to configure. It is not difficult to maintain. The key to deploying a successful Nagios installation is planning. Deploying Nagios is not a one person task, but a project requiring the involvement of one or more departments within your organization.

You need to have a thorough understanding of your Infrastructure:

What hardware do you need to monitor?
Can the hardware be classified into specific groups?
Can the services being provided by the hardware be classified into specific groups?
How many locations do you need to monitor? Nagios can be configured to provide distributed monitoring.
Which people are to be assigned the responsibility of addressing issues belonging to each specific hardware group?
Which people are to be assigned the responsibility of addressing issues belonging to each specific service group?
Do you have up-to-date contact information, including e-mail, mobile phone and home phone numbers?
What will be the notification hierarchy? Who will get notified first, who will get notified next?
Will you need to integrate with your trouble ticket and request handling system? Nagios integrates well with OTRS, RT, OSTicket, iTop, Service-Now.com and Atlassian JIRA.
Are you considering using SNMP to query the status of your devices? If so, you need to investigate which MIBs will be required for each piece of hardware, and whether or not they will return the information that you are seeking.

Deploying an Enterprise Monitoring System is a complex project. Your choice to use Nagios, or Nagios-based applications, versus applications like Zenoss, Zabbix, OpenNMS, Cacti, Ganglia or Munin should be based on how well each is able to meet all of your requirements, rather than how easy it is to deploy.

Other considerations should be:

How easy is it to get support?
How active and up-to-date are the on-line communities?
How much information and training resources are available?
How easy is it to move from the Open Source to the Commercial version?
Will it deliver the data in all of the forms and formats that are required?
Will it integrate with your existing applications like Splunk, Jira, OTRS, Puppet, OpsGenie or Active Directory?
How extensible is the application? How easily does it adapt to change?

Clearly, there is a lot of consideration and planning involved before reaching a decision regarding your best choice for Enterprise Monitoring. Choosing such a critical component for your Infrastructure shouldn't be easy, like Senate confirmation hearings shouldn't be easy. We all want the right man for the job, and we'll ask thousands of questions and leave no stone unturned in our investigations. Nagios is not easy. In most cases however, it is the best tool-set for the job.

Nagios is a great application as it stands for Enterprise Monitoring, and there are several companies that have built their own applications using Nagios at the core. Their products add to an already extensive feature set, while maintaining compatibility with existing Nagios plug-ins. One such company is Opsview. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, with offices in the USA and India, their flagship product smooths out the complexities of deploying Nagios. Opsview is used globally by many enterprise customers including blue chip organizations such as Comcast, BT Plusnet, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Siemens, Allianz, US Army, Irish Revenue and Yale University to name just a few.

All things considered. You should give Nagios and Opsview your full attention. Other companies are, and perhaps one or more of them are amongst your competition, and they couldn't possibly be any smarter than you. Could they?

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user76665Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

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Dec 21, 2013

I spend about 3 weeks vetting through 20+ open source monitoring solutions and at the end of the process, the choices had boiled down to few major ones - OMD (best combination of open source plug-ins put together for Nagios), Zabbix, and Zenoss.

I wrote a blog post describing the experience in more details. I am adding more visual stuff to the post but 80% of the content is there.

blog.unicsolution.com

it_user123504

Co-Founder / Executive Director / Chief Technical Officer at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

Jun 7, 2016

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We chose it because it was a flexible tool that happens to be open source and has the capability to provide a holistic view of all the systems configured on the network.

What is most valuable?

Monitoring Engine gives an in-depth dashboard of all the systems configured for monitoring
Capacity Planning shows the capacity trends of all the systems which enables you to plan appropriately for your needs
It has a good reporting tool and alert system

How has it helped my organization?

It improved our in-house support services as it helped changed them from being reactive to being proactive as notifications were sent about any device that was about to reach the set threshold.

What needs improvement?

It would be nice if the initial setup did not require as much tweaking and configuration and could just work out of the box.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using it for over a year.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Initially, we encountered problems during the setup as some errors were noted due to a few pre-requisites not being fulfilled and having some configuration files to edit, and plugins to add.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There have been no performance issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's been able to scale for our needs.

How are customer service and technical support?

The initial setup was a little bit straightforward but cumbersome as there was more work in tweaking to make it work and creating configuration files for each devices that needs to be monitored.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Nagios XI was chosen because it was a flexible tool that happens to be open source and has the capability to provide a holistic view of all the systems configured on the network. It also comes with a good Web Interface/Dashboard to update the system as needed.

How was the initial setup?

Our implementation was carried out by an in-house team.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user2652

Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees

Mar 4, 2016

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Open Source Network Monitoring Tool

Valuable Features:

Nagios is an open source monitoring tool for monitoring network services. Installation is quite easy and the interface is user-friendly and configurable. We can monitor disk space, CPU utilization, memory usage, host availability, NFS availability and a lot of other things. Due to its extensive features, it is widely used in IT markets.

Improvements to My Organization:

We used to get the system hung. After monitoring implementation, we keep on getting alerts for CPU, memory and other things. So, we take care of servers now before it goes to hung state.

Room for Improvement:

Nagios provides most of the features by default, however to add more services to it, it requires additional plugins which require little effort on administrative end. So far, clustering and failover of Nagios is not available-- development is still working on it.Highly recommended tool for monitoring services.!!

Use of Solution:

I have been using Nagios for 4 years now and still using it.

Deployment Issues:

There were no issues faced during deployment. It was pretty handy and most of its docs are generally available over the internet.

Other Advice:

Alternatives Vendors: Zabbix, Opennms, Zenoos, Cacti !!

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user266244

NOC Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 23, 2015

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It provides basic and complex monitoring of our environment as well as application-level monitoring, but notes can only be managed through the database.

What is most valuable?

There are a lot of plugins available and you can also write your own.

How has it helped my organization?

The product allows comprehensive monitoring of your environment. From basic monitoring of your servers health, to more complex tasks like AD, database, and, to some extent, application-level monitoring. Another great feature is that the event handlers allow you to automate repetitive tasks in your environment.

What needs improvement?

There's no convenient way to manage notes as the only way is to manage them through the database.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

I've worked on several occasions with Nagios customer service and technical support, always received very professional and prompt responses.

Technical Support:

I've worked on several occasions with Nagios customer service and technical support, always received very professional and prompt responses.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No previous solution used.

How was the initial setup?

It's very straightforward and and it has good documentation.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented it in-house.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Nagios Core is a free-ware which has almost the same functionality as NagiosXI. It's a bit less convenient to use, since it doesn't have UI for the configuration.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No other options were evaluated.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user423219Sales Team at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees

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Apr 12, 2016

Hi Dima, You can add config notes in Nagios Core and comments. It's not very straight forward at the moment though. I've heard it's being revamped in coming versions though. One other thing you can do is link to a wiki if you have one internally. Thanks for sharing your experience :)

it_user738369

Principal Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 17, 2017

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Saves us a lot of money and allows us to monitor anything we want

Pros and Cons

"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."

"Nagios XI can improve its GUI for users with a new look."

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

Four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.