Nagios Core Information 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

15 Reviews

InformationComputer Software3Internet7Telecommunications2Broadcast Media1Newspapers1Information Services1

anything or everything just monitor in Nagios Core

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 6, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

To monitor the critical business application services.
get better control over the servers.
Basically, Nagios Core helps us to act quickly and to reduce the impact of any business urgencies by giving the notifications in time with proper information's. Scope is to gain total governance and unattended monitor of servers and services with different parameters defined.

Pros

Notification
cron job check
server monitor
service monitor

Cons

May be some more plugins for different types service monitor
automation to configure the services
more documentation help support

Likelihood to Recommend

It's very stable and easy to use once you understand it. Any dashboards with graphs/ trends will be very helpful.
Nagios Core can do literally anything you need it to thanks to the amazing developer community and their ability to program custom addons. Need to monitor servers all over the world.
Having notifications and alerts for everything that is happening in your network is a great benefit to keep an edge over competitors.
Reliable and comprehensive monitoring for startups and beyond.

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology (Information Services company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

13 years of experience

Nagios quick review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

October 17, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In my case, Nagios is used as early alert on sensitive equipment in our data center such as servers, switches, routers and firewall, even on precision air conditioner, all of them using SNMP protocol.
Is used by the Data Center Operations Center Department and I think is not a business problem that it addresses but a matter of efficiency in the use of technical resources.

Pros

The use of SNMP Protocol is easy, transparent and almost effortless
The event handler has proved to be an extraordinary tool
the ability to work with other tools such as rrdt for graphics and nagvis for maps

Cons

Configuration
User interface
Native applications for Graphics

Likelihood to Recommend

In Data Centers Controls as first alert dashboards, in a Network Operation Center to map hot spots or graphs data bandwidth usage. Take advantage of event handlers to perform automated event based tasks or trigger email (sms) alert as a result of those events. As a result of his difficult configuration process it may not suitable for escenarios where you have to scale as a regular basis.

Alejandro Rojas

Gerente de Tecnologia in Information Technology at ABC Color (Newspapers, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

View profile

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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Efficiency and robustness in the monitoring of network assets.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 14, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Nagios to monitor applications and computing resource conditions, alerting us when there are any unusual events. We also use it for generating data and network maps that we monitor.

Pros

Monitor applications and computing resources.
Alert admins or administration groups by email.
Generate diverse statistics and monitored network maps.

Cons

Easier installation of Nagios.
There was a situation I experienced in which I monitored servers from some clients where I could not access them when they were behind a firewall doing NAT. I had to solve by applying a parameter in the commands.cfg file.
Problems with Network Configuration.

Likelihood to Recommend

Nagios is essential in a scenario where it is necessary to solve problems with monitored computational resources as soon as they are detected. It's also suited to manage SLA of network links and monitor to generate data about the use of these computational resources. I do not see an environment where it would not be appropriate to use the tool.

Ricardo Melo

Network Analyst in Information Technology at Aloo Telecom (Telecommunications, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

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Nagios keeps us on our toes

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 13, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have been using Nagios since the beginning of our business. Nagios has been an important necessity to monitor our servers as well as server services. We currently monitor over 1000+ instances of Nagios for our servers in our internal IT department as well as clients' private servers to ensure they remain stable and ensure uptime.

Pros

Monitor server uptime via ping options
Monitor server services such as HTTP, load, and server resources
Alert us to any issues a server might have so we can look into them right away

Cons

Minimal support as there is mostly just a user-based support community instead of the typical customer support option
If someone was new at setting it up, it's a time-consuming configuration in order to get the return/results you are looking for
Some security concerns since it is open source and any hackers can access the code to find vulnerabilities

Likelihood to Recommend

Nagios is well suited for everyone whether there is 1 server or 100+. It's a way of keeping your server secure and up. The alternative is just keeping the terminal open 24/7 but that won't tell you everything at once. You would need to look for different issues which Nagios assists with.

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology (Internet company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

Do you Nagios your infrastructure?

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 2, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Nagios all over the organization. We have several departments and each one uses an instance of Nagios to monitor their applications and infrastructure. The most important department that uses Nagios is our Networks Operations Center team. They are monitoring all our infrastructure 24/7 and configuring alerts to notify users about the status of their applications.

Pros

Monitoring infrastructure status
Alerts about infrastructure status
Reporting about services and checks

Cons

You need experience to configure checks.
Would like to see a cloud solution.

Likelihood to Recommend

I don't know if there is a less appropriate scenario. If you have an infrastructure and need to monitor it, Nagios is the best option. Not only can you monitor, but Nagios also alerts users and allows you to take actions depending on the alert. It helps a lot with automatization and is a tool you must have in your infrastructure.

Nicolas Pla

Gerente de Tecnologia in Information Technology at Despegar.com (Internet, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

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Nagios Empowered Monitoring

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 8, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As Nagios was the first monitoring system available for users about 15 years ago, I decided to implement the monitoring solution for a few dozen servers in the organization. However over time, the server-count had increased to 500+ while service-counts increased to 5000+. Nagios continued to remain stable for years on a simple dual-core(2Gb machine). Its ability to proactively detect issues in the system keeps our engineers informed hours (or days) ahead of a pending disaster.

As Nagios employes both Pull & Push Monitoring, implementing the plugins behind a firewall was never a hassle. Customizations were simple as any engineer with basic computer language knowledge can create plugins within minutes. I specifically choose bash, java & php as that's more familiar to me, while others chose Python,Perl or C#.

I have configured Nagios with the following technologies for better user experience.

MySQL (Storage & Retrieval) using the NDOUtil
NRDP (For push alerting when your servers are not accessible due to firewall rules)
Pnp4Nagios (for basic RRD graphing - I have tweaked the RRD settings to allow granular data over months of storage)
Grafana (for easy aggregated graphing, dashboards, heat-maps, alerts, user )

Pros

Ability to monitor the Application Logic - Regardless of the language the application was written, a simple plugin script can be quickly constructed to measure the key matrix of a running application (memory, heap, cpu%, db-conns, limits, delays in functions).
Open Source and the largest community of developers. There's a plugin for everything, including surveillance equipment, cameras, big-data analysis, AWS & Microsoft services. Over 10,000 plugins are available.
The Nagios data can be stored and plotted to any serial graphing system. We chose Grafana as it supports query graphing & dashboards.

Cons

Configuring and deploying the various open source plugins can be troublesome at first. It takes a bit of patience to connect all the various components (Nagios, NDOUtils, MySQL, NRDP, Pnp4Nagios, Batch-Processing, Grafana).
Most configurations are done through the command & configuration files. Although it has exceptional tuning, there is a moderate learning curve.
The Nagios UI might need better CSS styling as it still has the year 2005 look and feel. Although there are several mediocre UIs available, the heart of Nagios lies in monitoring.

Likelihood to Recommend

Nagios monitoring is well suited for any mission critical application that requires per/second (or minute) monitoring. This would probably include even a shuttle launch. As Nagios was built around Linux, most (85%) plugins are Linux based, therefore its more suitable for a Linux environment.

As Nagios (and dependent components) requires complex configurations & compilations, an experienced Linux engineer would be needed to install all relevant components.

Any company that has hundreds (or thousands) of servers & services to monitor would require a stable monitoring solution like Nagios. I have seen Nagios used in extremely mediocre ways, but the core power lies when its fully configured with all remaining open-source components (i.e. MySQL, Grafana, NRDP etc). Nagios in the hands of an experienced Linux engineer can transform the organizations monitoring by taking preventative measures before a disaster strikes.

Shawn Brito

Senior Systems Architect in Research & Development at Rezgateway (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile

Three Cheers for Nagios!!!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 2, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Nagios is being used primarily by the IT department but the management team makes use of its reporting features. With its robust monitoring and ease of use to set up our company has been happy with the product. Having the amount of information at our fingertips has made our jobs easier and given us the peace of mind that our systems are being monitored properly.

Pros

Monitoring of services is one of the biggest benefits for our company. Being able to respond in a timely fashion keeps business smooth.
Hardware and device monitoring are easy to set up with proper parameters.
Notification to key staff to be able to respond quickly makes issues go away faster.

Cons

There could be a better tutorial for setup but the overall system is very easy.
More options for notification would be great.
There could be a few more customization reporting functions.

Likelihood to Recommend

This tool is very appropriate for IT staff to have the information they need at their fingertips. Notifications are timely and response time to issues has been cut down immensely. If you are looking for Nagios to be the one network monitoring tool for your department then you are in the right place. Nagios will allow your staff to focus on problem resolution and create efficiency by putting more information at their disposal.

Eric Krueger

Operations/Systems Manager in Information Technology at Crowell Systems (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 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

View profile

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Nagios Empowered Monitoring

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 8, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have configured Nagios with the following technologies for better user experience.

MySQL (Storage & Retrieval) using the NDOUtil
NRDP (For push alerting when your servers are not accessible due to firewall rules)
Pnp4Nagios (for basic RRD graphing - I have tweaked the RRD settings to allow granular data over months of storage)
Grafana (for easy aggregated graphing, dashboards, heat-maps, alerts, user )

Pros

Ability to monitor the Application Logic - Regardless of the language the application was written, a simple plugin script can be quickly constructed to measure the key matrix of a running application (memory, heap, cpu%, db-conns, limits, delays in functions).
Open Source and the largest community of developers. There's a plugin for everything, including surveillance equipment, cameras, big-data analysis, AWS & Microsoft services. Over 10,000 plugins are available.
The Nagios data can be stored and plotted to any serial graphing system. We chose Grafana as it supports query graphing & dashboards.

Cons

Configuring and deploying the various open source plugins can be troublesome at first. It takes a bit of patience to connect all the various components (Nagios, NDOUtils, MySQL, NRDP, Pnp4Nagios, Batch-Processing, Grafana).
Most configurations are done through the command & configuration files. Although it has exceptional tuning, there is a moderate learning curve.
The Nagios UI might need better CSS styling as it still has the year 2005 look and feel. Although there are several mediocre UIs available, the heart of Nagios lies in monitoring.

Likelihood to Recommend

As Nagios (and dependent components) requires complex configurations & compilations, an experienced Linux engineer would be needed to install all relevant components.

Shawn Brito

Senior Systems Architect in Research & Development at Rezgateway (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile