Contemplating buying Nagios, your thoughts?

[HTmatt]

Obviously every service offering out there has up's and down's. I wanted to ask the community what things do you dislike / like about the Nagios solution and whether you would recommend it. I would appreciate insight from people whether you are a newly on-boarded partner or have been using them for years. Our budget is pretty tight so I want to make sure my first purchasing decision is strong as this will be my first change in the department I will be making since taking over the reigns. For what it is worth, we are using kaseya now.

[tmcdonald]

Thanks for your interest in Nagios!

I'll leave this post open for community discussion, but since this is our support forum we do have a SLA of sorts to keep. You might see us chime in every once in a while with a "bump" post to keep this off our TODO dashboard of posts that need technical answers.

[WillemDH]

Hey HTmat,,

I could write a few books about my migration from SCOM to Nagios. But some fast things that come to mind.

Advantages:
1) Very flexible monitoring solution. If you have some scripting knowledge, only the sky is the limit.
2) Customer support forum support is very helpful!
3) By offloading checks, for example mrtg related with mod gearman, vmware related with vma, you can monitor a lot of hosts with one XI server.
4) By using Nagios you get access to a ton of plugins created by the community on the Nagios Exchange.
5) You can create feature requests, which might be implemented by Nagios XI developers!
6) As far as I know, the only Nagios based monitoring solution that uses Highcharts, which generates interactive beautiful charts.
7) Create very beautiful dashboards and views with integrated NagVis maps and charts.
8) One monitoring solution for network, servers and storage.
9) Very nice integration with Nagios Reactor for advanced event handlers and event chains!
10) Very stable monitoring solution (compared to SCOM)
11) Real-time eventlog monitoring with NSClient++
12) Quick action component for hosts is super useful.
13) Very nice Linux - Windows integration

I could go on for some time...

Biggest Disadvantages (for me):
1) The reporting is very slow on larger systems (but they are working on it).
2) NagVis is not really up-to-date and misses some features of last releases (like zooming in and out on maps). This prevents us from using bigger maps with more information on it. (on for example fancy touchscreens.. )
3) The metrics component also needs some work. It's not possible make top X lists for nrpe based checks. (but they are working on it).
4) The default Graph interval is 5 minutes. It seems not possible to get Highcharts with an interval of 1 minute. (this is possible with pnp4nagios though)

Buy the Enterprise Edition, it will save you time and is definitely worth the 750 $ (depends of course on how many hosts you wish to monitor. If you only need 50 hosts, enterprise edition is probably not worth it)
In general Nagios XI was a revelation to me and the company I work for. 45 % of all our support tickets are generated from Nagios XI. (which is amazing imho with 5000 endusers)

@Nagios => Feel free to comment on my advantages / disadvantages

Grtz

Willem

[lmiltchev]

Thanks, WillemDH! You have many valid points.
I would like to add that the feedback from users (like you) had helped us a lot to identify bugs and make improvements. I am sure you will love the next major release of XI... and the "new" Metrics component!