Get rid of Nagios (just kidding)
I had this post in draft for quite a long time, now I have some time to publish it. Beware: it is based on quite old articles but I’d like to give my opinion since this kind of all-or-nothing claims are to be taken with a grain of salt.
Let’s start with Gartner (1,2) for those who believe to the almighty “magic quadrant”. Despite saying a lot of obvious things (“Nagios is free and you can’t beat that”) there are some faults, one of the biggest being: for every product (free or not) YOU (or your outsourcer) has to have the skills to use/maintain it. Even with HP Openview Operations. Or IBM Tivoli. And if a valuable person leaves your company leaving you without skills on a particular product you cannot blame… the product. Maybe start without relying on a “one man person team”. Nagios helped me to augment different HP Operations installations with benefit for both the customer (gets a better monitoring environment) and HP (who still maintains leadership in large enterprise and can get feedback about possible enhancements). Where Nagios (or similar OSS solutions) are unbeatable is where you can’t spend a lot of money in licenses (but hopefully are willing to spend for the support). Speaking about tech support: I prefer an honest one through mailing lists, github issues without guarantees but with a lot of good will than a commercial, formally correct, very rigid (and always without guarantees of resolution of the problem) support. A good tech support, even from big names is a difficult thing to achieve (mostly because of the company size: when solving problems fast it’s imperative to reach the technical people often buried under contracts options, level 1 help desks and support teams, escalation managers and so on).
One different an more interesting approach (even funny) is Andy’s:
Ok, Nagios is dated (I also began using it when the name was Netsaint). So what?
It means that is mature and your can rely on it. And for a lot of not-on-the-edge customers it’s ok.
For a reasonable amount of money (for support and someone who gets it running… like me) you’ll get a product that you can control with lots of documentation and without forums hidden behind… a support contract.
I won’t go into the technical details but Andy has a good point: Nagios starts to feel a little bit dated but there are a lot of add-ons that deliver very good solutions. Now. And given the LEGO-style approach (you get the pieces you like and combine them to reach your goal) it wins hands down when compared to all-in-one solutions (that usually solves a few problems in a good way and leaves a lot unsolved).
