Nagios Core Reviews & Insights

Score8.6 out of 10

166 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Nagios Core are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Flexibility and Configurability: Many users have praised Nagios for its extreme flexibility and configurability. They appreciate the ability to customize the monitoring according to their specific needs, including agent and agentless monitoring solutions with a variety of plugins.

Intuitive User Interface: The simplicity and ease of use of Nagios' user interface are highly praised by users. They mention that the interface is intuitive and easy to read, allowing them to quickly understand the monitoring status and identify any issues.

Extensibility through Plugins: The extensibility of Nagios through plugins, scripts, and customizations is highly valued by users. They mention that they have been able to add any needed functionality using plugins and scripts, making Nagios more flexible than other monitoring systems.

Nagios Core Reviews

9 Reviews

Engineering

Powerful Monitoring tool

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 25, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Nagios along with several hundred custom checks to monitor our environment and customer environments. We have been running Nagios Open source for 15 years, I have been directly involved in managing it for 5 years. It addresses our need for Systems monitoring and works alongside many other tools in our Open source Ecosystem

Pros

Endpoint Monitoring
Raising Issues
Network Monitoring

Cons

Steep Learning curve
Highly customizable to a fault

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for use with skilled system administrators who know what they need to monitor and what they need for alerts.
It is not well suited if you just want general monitoring with out a good grasp of why they are monitoring.

Steven Peterson

Senior Systems Analyst in Engineering at Mainstream Technology Group (Computer & Network Security, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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Nagios: DIY Full Stack Monitoring

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 15, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Nagios to monitor our servers to make sure they are online and healthy. We use it in addition to third-party monitoring services so we have redundancy in monitoring. Nagios tells us if the host is up or not and if any of its services are struggling. The ability to monitor services is nice because it gives us an early warning and we can fix problems before they become critical. We are using Nagios to monitor basic services like web servers and databases.

Pros

It can monitor just about anything because of its extensive plugin directory.
It's free, so it is a great solution if you are on a limited budget.
It can be customized any way you'd like, so you have complete control over the delivery and presentation of notifications.

Cons

It's built by engineers for engineers so setting it up and configuring it is relatively complicated. It could really use a simplified configuration approach, or a GUI to set it up instead of editing config files.
I'd like to see the option to have service notification settings inherited from the host setting notifications. They have to be set up separately but they are often the same, so it would be nice to have less redundancy.

Likelihood to Recommend

Nagios is great for engineers, sys admins, and do it yourself types. If any of my colleagues are of this type of field I'll recommend Nagios. If you are not familiar with the Linux command line, I would sway you away from Nagios and recommend a third party web-based monitoring service instead.

John Reeve

Co-founder, lead developer in Engineering at Intervals (Internet, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

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Nagios Overview

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 7, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I recommend Nagios for whole servers, routers, switches on organizations, and application too. Nagios will send emails. Nagios will show information on equipment or applications with trouble. Nagios is very powerful.

Pros

Nagios has a big community, maybe each day you have a new programmed plugin or a plugin for new hardware or software. This is perfect because they work with Nagios XI and Nagios Core (paid and free version).
You can use the free version (that is limited version), but if you want to go to the paid version (Nagios XI) with more features, you don't need to migrate all the information. [You] only [have to] update and integrate.
Nagios is not married to a big enterprise of software or hardware, this is marvelous. Nagios can monitor all platforms and major applications.

Cons

Best monitoring since [the] cell phone. Today it's functional but ugly.
Best platform for sending to an app (like WhatsApp) telegram messages.

Likelihood to Recommend

The best scenarios: Big or medium companies with own [their] datacenters. For example 20 or more servers, routers, switches.
The worst scenarios: Servers in the cloud (they can use other solutions) or less than 5 servers in the company.

Dario Leon

Director - Consultor Senior Unix/Linux - Freelance in Engineering at Cacao Servicios Tecnologicos (Banking, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

10 years of experience

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Nagios, the only monitoring you almost always need!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 13, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use Nagios in our operations department to monitor the health of our internal tooling and customer facing products.

Pros

Connectivity checks in nagios are simple and impactful. Having a ping check on every host should be step one in any Nagios deployment.
The plugin network for Nagios is huge, and very extensible. Chances are someone has already wrote and shared a plugin that does exactly what you need. But if not, you can write your own.
With features like remote plugin executor (NRPE) you can do remote checks (pull style) instead of push. Having the option to do both is great.

Cons

The Nagios web interface is not the prettiest, and stays fairly stagnant behind more modern approaches to displaying information.
The ability to add service comments is a nice feature but the fact you must often manually delete them is annoying. It'd be great if comments were wiped when a status changed (critical -> healthy).

Likelihood to Recommend

Anytime you are monitoring metal, I think of Nagios almost first. It's so easy to add the basic (ping, disk, CPU, etc.) health checks that you can be up and running quite fast. When you have more specific application metrics that you want to look into, it may be more difficult to get Nagios working. For example, you don't want to know if an application is up or down, but rather how its overall health is.

David Mathis II

Systems Engineer Lead in Engineering at Media Temple (Internet, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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Belgium Telco company Nagios Advice

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 5, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Nagios in our provisioning department to have all vitals and parameters on the radar. Nagios is really useful and powerful for both kinds of servers Windows and/or Linux. It's simple to use and configure. In the past, I implemented Nagios to a media company to monitor network backbone and equipment. It was the best monitoring tool used in this media company. If you need a powerful monitoring with a minimal cost and great scalability, there is just one choice - NAGIOS.

Pros

Scalability
Dashboarding
Robustness
Simplicity
Cost
Usability

Cons

Doesn't support some proprietary equipment in the telecommunication industry

Likelihood to Recommend

Useful for networks and server solutions.
Less usefully when using some proprietary equipment without SNMP MIB

Labeye Michael

ITVS Engineer in Engineering at VOO (Telecommunications, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

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Ny Nagios review

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

June 13, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used Nagios in the past and its a great product. I would use it again to monitor my PROD/Dev/QA. We would use it to monitor our storage, Linux, Windows and at the time Citrix XenServer environment.

Pros

You can build your own modules.
Extremely flexible and configurable.

Cons

Configuration can be a pain.
Needs to be more examples of how to set up host groups and how to set up any computer/server to be tied to a host group.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Information Technology and Services company, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

Nagios review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 10, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Nagios is used by the Operations Department in order to monitor our infrastructure and some application healthchecks.

Pros

There isn't a huge learning curve for someone who is new to the organization to jump in and start creating health checks and auditing the old ones.
It provides information clearly and organizes it for the NOC or whoever may be looking at it to have a good idea of where to start their troubleshooting.

Cons

At time Nagios isn't the quickest to clear alerts and some odd issues can stop it from clearing alerts that I've seen in the past, such as a new host type being added to the configuration without a valid host being spun up before hand. I've only seen it at one previous company.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is great for monitoring our infrastructure and some applications. I haven't attempted anything outside of this.

Alan-Michael Barnes

DevOps Engineer in Engineering at MobiTV (Entertainment, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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90s era Nagios is still hard to beat for self-hosted monitoring

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

December 7, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Nagios is part of our monitoring stack and monitors each server and service in use. All backend engineers use Nagios, when on pager duty and when setting up new services and services.

Pros

Nagios is the gold standard for compatibility; there is a community provided plugin for monitoring almost anything.
Plugins are easy to write in almost any language - most engineers can put together a Nagios plugin in a short time if they can write a program that runs on a *nix server.
Check schedules and notifications are flexible, although complex to configure.

Cons

The web interface is complicated and hard to understand for new users.
The configuration syntax is brittle and breaks in unexpected ways.
It's very easy to get too many notifications from Nagios. This isn't really a problem due to Nagios itself, because with enough configuration you can stop it from doing this. But too many notifications very quickly leads to Nagios exhaustion in your team, which leads to people ignoring Nagios.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are not a UNIX/Linux shop, don't try to get Nagios into your environment. There are ways of running monitoring agents on Windows hosts but it is needlessly complicated. If you are a UNIX/Linux shop and need to monitor custom things or things that need to be protected behind a firewall, Nagios is a good choice. However, first consider if you can use one of the more modern SaaS monitoring solutions. You'll lose some flexibility but gain in ease of use and team energy spent maintaining Nagios.

Martin Melin

Head of Engineering in Engineering at Tictail (Internet, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

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Nagios - Oldie but goodie

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

December 1, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used Nagios for over 10 years. It has been a great tool to monitor and react to emergencies and is flexible and easy to implement. Nagios allows us to connect to each of our servers and connect to all the services, ports, metrics, etc., for each server we have.

Pros

Trusted
Easy to implement
Many plugins already written

Cons

Archaic
Dated UI
Quirky

Likelihood to Recommend

Nagios is great if you're just learning about monitoring and want something that has been used for years. I have installed it in almost every company that I have worked for and it has been a great portal to the health and well being of our systems. At this point it is archaic software and there are better ways to implement monitoring (Sensu, Zabbix, Datadog, etc).

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

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