What is Nagios?
Nagios is a family of monitoring products. Nagios Core is the open-source monitoring engine: a host, service and network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. It monitors websites, servers, switches, routers, firewalls, ports, applications and metrics, and contributors have been working on it since 1999.
Nagios XI is the commercial product built for the same purpose. It runs on your own Linux server, runs plugins against hosts and services at fixed intervals, and compares each result with the warning and critical ranges you set. It offers 90+ configuration wizards and auto-discovery, SNMP, WMI, WinRM and SSH checks without an agent, an open REST API, and perpetual licensing priced by the number of nodes. The listed price starts at $2,595 for 100 nodes in the Standard edition, and a free tier covers seven nodes or 100 services, self-supported.
Both products rely on plugins. Nagios Exchange hosts thousands of community-built plugins, scripts and add-ons, and the NCPA agent covers Windows, Linux and Mac.
Key capabilities
- Host and service checks Nagios Core monitors websites, servers, switches, routers, firewalls, ports and applications.
- Plugins Thousands of community-built plugins and add-ons on Nagios Exchange.
- NCPA agent A cross-platform agent for Windows, Linux and Mac.
- XI configuration wizards 90+ wizards and auto-discovery in Nagios XI.
- Agentless checks SNMP, WMI, WinRM and SSH in Nagios XI.
- REST API An open REST API and built-in automation in Nagios XI.
Where Nagios fits
- Host, service and network availability checks
- Metrics and application monitoring
- Agent-based and agentless data collection
- Plugin-based extension
- Alerting on state changes
- Commercial dashboards and reporting in Nagios XI
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Alternatives to Nagios
ChronosphereChronosphere is an observability platform built for Kubernetes that its site says is now Cortex XCOR by Palo Alto Networks, with telemetry cost controls.
CoralogixCoralogix provides log, metrics and APM observability built on a streaming analytics architecture that avoids traditional indexed hot storage, with a 14-day free trial and usage-based pricing.