Opinions and Reviews for Nagios Host and Service Monitor

I've been doing some research lately, trying to figure out some good ways my company can save some money on the things that we spend too much on. One thing I've come across is that we often times license expensive software, when there are open-source or other free solutions out there.

This being the case, I'm looking to do some research on Nagios network monitor, an open-source alternative to products like IP Monitor, which is what we're currently using. What we mainly use it for is to check and see if various systems in the datacenter and internal systems are still up and running. We use the PING monitor, and a few systems check SMTP and some other services. When IP Monitor pings a machine and doesn't get a response for a predefined length of time, it sends out an email to our support inbox, as well as sending out a page to the support crew that there is something wrong.

From the looks of it, Nagios seems to be able to do those things, and has a lot of similarities to IP Monitor and the like, and I'm going to be testing it out to see if it would suit our needs. I'm wondering if anyone has any prior experience with Nagios, any horror stories/success stories/warnings/recommendations about it, or has any other information to share about it. It seems like a fairly popular tool, and comes packaged with FreeBSD, Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, Alt Linux, and a few others. I'm hoping that I'm not the only one who's heard of it.

I'll be checking in with this thread every once in a while, and I'm hoping to have some experiences to report once I've tested the thing out.

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Comments

theseman

I do not have any hands-on experience with the product. Howerver;

The hospital serving the city that I live in (pop 50,000 + rural support) uses Nagios to monitor all of their servers etc. They have several operations staff that do pretty much nothing but watch for any alerts that their specified counters set. It looked like a very nice tool to centrally monitor your equipment, and if you have people that can modify it for your needs (they employ a slew of in-house programmers), it can prove most useful.

Hope this helps.

mwgood

I work in a SP environment. Nagios monitors both the internal and customer equipment. I didn't install it, so I don't know what it looks like from a configuration perspective, but the UI and functionality work great.

Definitely worth a look.

Slowhand

Thanks for the info, guys. It's good to know it's out there and being used by larger setups, and not just "something that's supposed to work". I'm going to do some pretty extensive testing, I'm hoping it'll work for us. The only little barb in my side is that, while IP Monitor and other Windows-based tools like it support monitoring of Active Directory, it doesn't look like Nagios has that kind of capability. I was kind of hoping to expand on the features available to us, and begin using the monitoring tools to help out with some much-needed AD administration, since we don't use much of anything aside from the PING monitors as it stands right now.

I'm sure, since it's an open-source and *NIX-based piece of software, that any kind of interoperability with AD is a stretch. . . but, who knows, maybe there's some fool-hearty developer out there that created a plugin. We'll just have to wait and see, but I'm liking what I see, so far.