What Nagios Provides

Designed with scalability and flexibility in mind, Nagios gives you the peace of mind that comes from knowing your organization’s business processes won’t be affected by unknown outages.

Nagios is a powerful tool that provides you with instant awareness of your organization’s mission-critical IT infrastructure. Nagios allows you to detect and repair problems and mitigate future issues before they affect end-users and customers.

By using Nagios, you can:

• Plan for infrastructure upgrades before outdated systems cause failures
• Respond to issues at the first sign of a problem
• Automatically fix problems when they are detected
• Coordinate technical team responses
• Ensure your organization’s SLAs are being met
• Ensure IT infrastructure outages have a minimal effect on your organization’s bottom line
• Monitor your entire infrastructure and business processes

How It Works

Monitoring

howitworks-monitoringIT staff configure Nagios to monitor critical IT infrastructure components, including system metrics, network protocols, applications, services, servers, and network infrastructure.

Alerting

howitworks-alertingNagios sends alerts when critical infrastructure components fail and recover, providing administrators with notice of important events. Alerts can be delivered via email, SMS, or custom script.

Response

IT staff can acknowledge alerts and begin resolving outages and investigating security alerts immediately. Alerts can be escalated to different groups if alerts are not acknowledged in a timely manner.

Reporting

howitworks-reportingReports provide a historical record of outages, events, notifications, and alert response for later review. Availability reports help ensure your SLAs are being met.

Maintenance

howitworks-maintenanceScheduled downtime prevents alerts during scheduled maintenance and upgrade Windows.

Planning

howitworks-planningTrending and capacity planning graphs and reports allow you to identify necessary infrastructure upgrades before failures occur.

Nagios structure

A user can choose to work in the command-line interface (CLI) or select a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) in some versions of Nagios and from third parties. Nagios’ dashboard provides an overview of the critical parameters monitored on assets.

Based on the parameters and thresholds defined, Nagios can send out alerts if critical levels are reached. These notifications can be sent in different ways, including email and text messages. An authorization system allows the administrator to restrict access.

Nagios runs both agent-based and agentless configurations. Independent agents are installed on any hardware or software system to collect data that is then reported back to the management server. Agentless monitoring uses existing protocols to emulate an agent. Both approaches can monitor file system usage, OS metrics, service and process states and more.

Examples of Nagios agents include Nagios Remote Data Processor (NRDP), Nagios Cross Platform Agent (NCPA) and NSClient++. Nagios can also run remote scripts and plug-ins using the Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE) agent. NRPE enables remote monitoring of system metrics such as system load, memory and disk usage. It consists of the check_nrpe plug-in, which is stored on the local monitoring machine, and the NRDP, running on the remote machine. Nagios uses a plug-in to consolidate data from the NRPE agent before it goes to the management server for processing. NRPE can also communicate with Windows agents to monitor Windows machines.

Nagios supports plug-ins that are stand-alone add-ons and extensions so the user can define targets and which parameters on these targets to monitor. Nagios plug-ins process command-line arguments and communicate the commands with Nagios Core. There are around 50 plug-ins developed and maintained by Nagios, while there are over 3,000 from the community. These plug-ins are categorized into lists including hardware, software, cloud, OSes, security, log files and network connections. As an example, when used in conjunction with environmental-sensing systems, a Nagios plug-in can share data on environmental variables, such as temperature, humidity or barometric pressure.

Nagios products

Nagios has proven popular among small and large businesses, as well as internet service providers (ISPs), educational institutions, government agencies, healthcare institutions, manufacturing companies and financial institutions.

Users can choose among free and paid options, depending on the needed services and support.

Nagios Core. The service that was originally known as Nagios is now referred to as Nagios Core. Core is freely available as an open source monitoring software for IT systems, networks and infrastructure. Core contains a wide array of infrastructure monitoring through allowing plug-ins to extend its monitoring capabilities. It is the base for paid Nagios monitoring systems.

Nagios Core has an optional web interface, which displays network status, notifications, log files and more. Core can notify its user when there are server or host issues. Additionally, Core can monitor network services such as SMTP, HTTP and Ping.

Nagios XI

Nagios XI is an extended interface of Nagios Core, intended as the enterprise-level version of the monitoring tool. XI acts as monitoring software, configuration manager and toolkit. While Nagios Core is free, XI must be purchased from Nagios Enterprises. Atop the same features as Core, XI adds preconfigured virtual machines (VMs), a web configuration user interface (UI), performance graphing, a mobile application, dashboards, scheduled reporting, technical support through email and more.

Nagios XI monitors IT infrastructure components such as applications, OSes, networks and system metrics. Plug-ins are supported for these infrastructure components to expand on XI’s monitoring capabilities.

Other commercial extensions of Nagio

Nagios Log Server is a log monitoring and management tool that enables an organization to view, sort and configure logs from its IT infrastructure, including Windows event logs. Log Server can analyze, collect and store logged data based off of custom and preassigned specifications. The administrator can set alerts to notify Log Server users when there is a potential threat or malfunction on a monitored asset. For example, an alert goes out to the Microsoft Exchange administrator when there are three failed login attempts to Exchange Server, meaning there could be an unwarranted person trying to guess the password to the system.

Nagios Network Analyzer tracks network traffic and bandwidth utilization. Network Analyzer can resolve network outages, abnormalities and security threats. Some features include automated security alerts, customizable application monitoring, integration with Nagios IX and a bandwidth utilization calculator.

Nagios Fusion is an aggregation service for Nagios Core and Nagios XI servers, showing multiple systems in one view. Fusion condenses network management by centralizing features and data from XI and Core in one location. This allows for a granular view of a network infrastructure. With Fusion, an administrator can specify which XI and Core servers are displayed and manage which users are allowed to view those servers. Additionally, Fusion users can log into any managed server and use cached or live data to configure charts and other graphics to appear on dashboards.

Nagios competitors

Nagios competitors include Zenoss, Zabbix, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and SolarWinds, among other open source and commercial monitoring tools.

Zenoss is IT monitoring software for cloud, virtual and physical IT environments. Zenoss monitors servers, networks, VMs, databases and other hardware and software assets in an IT infrastructure. Similar to Nagios, Zenoss is available as an open source version called Zenoss Core or more extensive paid, supported options including Zenoss Service Dynamics and Zenoss as a Service. Service Dynamics is the on-site version of the software, while Zenoss as a Service is a software as a service (SaaS) option. Similar to Nagios products, Zenoss products provide plug-ins, called ZenPacks, which extend monitoring capabilities.

Zabbix is an open source monitoring tool for Linux, Unix and Windows OSes that relies on agents to collect monitoring data. It can also use common protocols for agentless operation. The technology is designed to monitor physical and cloud assets, VMs, services and applications. Zabbix is evolving for cloud deployment as well as on premises.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager enables the user to configure, manage and monitor devices and applications via the same console. SCOM tracks server hardware, system services, OSes, hypervisors and applications. SCOM, like Nagios, relies on agents or agentless-based monitoring for its data collection, and it supports plug-ins.

SolarWinds’ Server & Application Monitor software works with applications, servers and databases as well. Server & Application Monitor features performance monitoring, server management, alerts and reporting through agentless monitoring. Server & Application Monitor also supports other SolarWinds products.

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