IT-enabled apps and services that power your business are inherently dependent upon the performance, health and security of the underlying network infrastructure. Holistic visibility and granular control into the network resources is critical to maintain a stable and optimized operating IT environment. To meet these goals, organizations are pursuing Nagios alternatives that offer more flexibility, automation and cost-effectiveness.
Nagios as an old and open source network monitoring solution was designed with a minimalism design concept and offers limited features out-of-the-box. Complicated manual configuration, lack of a user-friendly graphical user interface and no automated device discovery capabilities is achievable without installing add-ons. Considering the maturity of the Nagios community, additional plugins and support are often available to fulfil these limitations. However, IT teams are still required to invest significant resources and time to make the solution work within the continuously evolving and complex dynamics of their network infrastructure. Failure to effectively maintain, update and enhance the functionality of the Nagios monitoring solution ultimately bottlenecks the performance of agile IT teams that thrive on always available and highly responsive network environments.
Several Nagios replacements are designed in context of these challenges and IT needs of a modern IT professional. This article explores five great Nagios alternatives and highlights some key considerations, pros and cons that could impact your decision preference for the best network monitoring solution. Evanios offers pre-packaged, supported integrations to each of these products.
Pros
- A commercial open source Nagios alternative that will meet most network monitoring requirements of an SMB organization.
- As an API driven solution, users can enhance the functionality of the tool with third party integrations and leverage a growing knowledge base to support their deployment efforts.
- OP5 Monitor is developed on a Nagios-based code and boasts deep support and collaboration the Nagios ecosystem.
- The Nagios replacement offers agentless monitoring and automation of mundane recurring monitoring processes.
- The solution is designed to enable unified monitoring. The end-to-end monitoring capability with a single-pane-of-glass view is useful for organizations with limited IT admins and professionals.
- Customization options include personalized dashboards and reports for SLAs, alarms and availability, among others.
Cons
- Ability to serve large, complex and distributed network infrastructure is specific to the full-featured product (license required).
- Automation capabilities are limited out of the box, but may be enhanced through event management integration (e.g. Evanios).
Pros
- A simple monitoring solution that is known for collecting detailed information and raising accurate alerts.
- This Nagios replacement is easy to set up and install. A configuration wizard guides through the process such that no further edits to the configuration files are required. The solution also offers powerful agentless monitoring capabilities.
- Native support to various network monitoring capabilities eliminates the need for additional plugins. These include functionality such as automated network discovery, mapping and topology settings, among other protocols and features. The product works as an all-in-one solution for standard network monitoring needs.
- Low learning curve.
- Intuitive interface that allows users to create flexible notifications and threshold functionality within the tree maps.
- Useful for SMBs considering the lower cost barrier as compared to other Nagios alternatives.
Cons
- Resource intensive in scaled environments. Speed impact is noticeable for large workloads.
- Lacks adequate customization for reports, alerting and network mapping.
- While it’s easy to deploy new probes, rigorous planning is necessary for highly scaled environments to avoid limitations such as inability to group sensors at a high level.
Pros
- A flexible Nagios replacement that allows users to leverage a variety of templates for default monitoring schemas or script custom monitors and connection profiles for various devices that are not natively supported.
- Custom reporting capabilities with flexible scheduling options are available – if hundreds of reporting templates out of the box aren’t enough.
- Network mapping and capacity planning capabilities provide a holistic overview of baseline information, health and performance of the entire network. The Graphical User Interface is intuitive and easy to use.
- Built-in Intelligent Alerts mechanism that cuts through the noise and lets meaningful alerts and network topology-aware triggering notifications to reach appropriate users.
- Integration with a wide range of SolarWinds products to monitor, configure and manage the network infrastructure, devices and apps.
Cons
- High price tag Nagios alternative for small enterprises and startup firms – especially for scalable environments. For instance, upwards of 10000 elements may require additional polling engines.
- Vast customization options may be overwhelming for new users.
- Most suitable for midsize to large enterprises only.
Pros
- Open source tool as a free alternative to high-end network monitoring solutions, which serves particularly well for SMBs and startup firms.
- Strong community and documentation support is available for this Nagios replacement.
- Proactive Monitoring and Capacity Planning features empower organizations to maximize resource utilization, reduce costs and operate a zero-waste network infrastructure.
- In addition to the standard templates, the solution offers strong customization and flexibility for monitoring, reporting and alerting. For instance, multi-level infrastructure mapping allows user to establish custom monitoring on multiple levels, across different network elements. True value of the solution is realized by leveraging the API to build specific dashboards and automate the tasks such as creating and modifying triggers, charts and other items.
- The Nagios replacement offers agentless monitoring but with limited functionality.
Cons
- Slow for scaled environments – a performance difference is noticeable for infrastructure with upwards of 10,000 hosts.
- The GUI is basic as compared to the paid alternatives.
- Customizations and scripting are often required as the standard templates may not suffice to meet the unique needs of many use cases.
- Steep learning curve.
Pros
- A sophisticated Nagios replacement to monitor large, complex and distributed network infrastructure. The Nagios alternative is truly capable of portraying a clear overview of the changing network dynamics in real-time.
- Some of the valuable capabilities include the dependency mapping during troubleshooting processes. Features such as Automated Root Cause Analysis enable fast and accurate discovery of problems with detailed information on relationship with other network elements.
- Intuitive analytics allow users to identify bottlenecks and keep track of workloads.
- Strong community support and documentation.
- Also offers agentless monitoring functionality.
Cons
- The interface is slightly complicated and requires adequate knowledge of network protocols, utilities and services.
- Expensive Nagios alternative and often requires training. Although a range of resources are available, the need to learn puts additional stress to overwhelmed IT and network admin teams. This may add to the cost of operating the solution.
- Suitable for midsize and large enterprises. Small businesses and startup firms may struggle to justify the cost unless the network scales into a complex environment.
- The initial installation and set up process is complicated and requires users to go through several post-configuration processes, terminal commands and interactions with other applications and OS based on their network requirements.
All of these Nagios alternatives offer unique value propositions but also maintain some limitations around functionality, cost and performance that must be taken into consideration. Fortunately, Evanios lets your easily integrate all monitoring tools, and correlate with ITSM data (e.g. CMDB, Incident, Change Management) via pre-built support and no requirement for coding. Evanios progression model is simple: align your monitoring capabilities with your business requirements; automate processes with superior intelligence to cut through the noise; and enable truly proactive insights and response.
The end result is an always available, agile and optimized IT network that lets your teams focus on innovation instead of merely keeping the lights on.
