ConnectWise Automate vs. Nagios Core

I recommend it to all IT colleagues; regardless of the size of the PCs with which you work most of the time, the application allows connection stability between computers that make it possible to continue working or taking care of the infrastructure from afar.

Incentivized

Nagios is simply a very configurable and rock solid monitoring engine. For these reasons I would recommend it to any IT professional in any medium to large organization where creating custom checks and programming ones custom needs into the configuration is practical. I would be more hesitant to recommend it as a first monitoring solution for a small business which is usually accompanied by a less experienced and/or more time constrained admin.

Incentivized

• Automated patching. The patch management is very robust and doesn't let us down. We can rely on it to do its job.
• Scripting. The scripting engine and layout is excellent. It's very easy to work with and adapt Powershell scripts and other script to the native format with its functions. It also gives detailed logs to help determine why something went wrong if there's issues.

Incentivized

• Network and server status alerts if a device is in a down state.
• Gives you the top view down of your entire network infrastructure.
• It can be customized to your exact needs.
• You have two options of agentless and agent monitoring.

Incentivized

• You can track all your clients information and every single job you do for them. You can do quotes, send them, add providers to compare prices, manage the calendar of the employees, assign tickets to the correct person, there is nothing you can't do with this tool.
• Inside all the greatness, there are some works around that you have to do for specific duties that could be automated.
• Make sure you keep notes on each client profile, you can use the private note section, it is secure and it works as a reminder of everything you need to do about that specific client, only you and your employees will see those.

Incentivized

• It's built by engineers for engineers so setting it up and configuring it is relatively complicated. It could really use a simplified configuration approach, or a GUI to set it up instead of editing config files.
• I'd like to see the option to have service notification settings inherited from the host setting notifications. They have to be set up separately but they are often the same, so it would be nice to have less redundancy.

Incentivized

Support and the Speed of supporting the latest technology is the main reason for not giving this a 10. But the product is powerful and flexible. The best way that I can sum it up is "You can get out of it what you put in to it"

Incentivized

We're currently looking to combine a bunch of our network montioring solutions into a single platform. Running multiple unique solutions for monitoring, data collection, compliance reporting etc has become a lot to manage.

Incentivized

Basic use of the product is fairly easy. Information about the machines you manage can be found in customizable dashboards, which can be unique for each user, and, therefore, properly suited to the users' needs/job function. This is not a 10 because some of the interfaces are very clunky (Patch Management), and some features are not intuitive and not well documented (reporting). Scripting and Patch Management have a fairly steep learning curve (For structure in patch management and syntax in scripting), but once learned, they work well.

Incentivized

The Nagios UI is in need of a complete overhaul. Nice graphics and trendy fonts are easy on the eyes, but the menu system is dated, the lack of built in graphing support is confusing, and the learning curve for a new user is too steep.

Incentivized

It used to be great, but then they broke reporting, speed and responsiveness with version 11 and the new Patch Manager. It's really bad and their support people are way behind on fixing so many bugs. They have really gone downhill. If they don't get it together soon, we'll start looking around.

Incentivized

Far too many issues that take ages to get resolved. Even their chat support takes a long time to get in contact with someone. When you do chat with a support rep they generally can't help you and just escalate the ticket. At least everything you've chatted about is now in the ticket.

Incentivized

I haven't had to use support very often, but when I have, it has been effective in helping to accomplish our goals. Since Nagios has been very popular for a long time, there is also a very large user base from which to learn from and help you get your questions answered.

Incentivized

LabTech online training is very very thorough in training and helping individuals understand the theory and practical side of using a Remote Monitoring & Management. The training has multiple methods of explaining each section which helps to re-enforce everything about the Training Modules. I have had some Engineers lose their interest after a number of modules because they said that it was too much, that was too similar. I've found that the training is tailored towards a technical background but the Sales training does help NON technical individuals familiarize themselves with the Remote Monitoring and Management components and how it relates to Managed Services.

Incentivized

ConnectWise Automate was already implemented at all organizations I have used it at when I started at those MSPs. At my current MSP, we used professional services for a period after I took over management of it, and they assisted with changes that I saw needed to be made. While not specifically implemented, those services were well organized and well scheduled, and all things we discussed were tracked and recorded, allowing for good change management/tracking.

Incentivized

I have evaluated NinjaRMM, but it was after I was already familiar with ConnectWise Automate. While it seems like a good product, I found that ConnectWise Automate was more flexible in allowing me to make custom configurations to meet various business needs across different clients. I have also evaluated Addigy. While I think Addigy does a better job of managing apple devices, it is clunkier, and customization is harder in Addigy than in ConnectWise Automate.

Incentivized

We have tested several other monitoring products which were able to monitor the basic matrix (Memory, DiskUsage, CPU%, UpTime, Running Service Status, Port 80 Up/Down). Although some offered far better UIs, they lacked the ability to monitor ANYTHING. Zabbix, being the only contender worthy of competing, is a good alternative to Nagios. We also tried Zenoss Core & OpenNMS which were good enough for non-Linux engineers to get started with. OP5 was another service-oriented monitoring solution we evaluated. Apart from Nagios, Consul is heavily used to monitor & register the micro-service systems & end-point URLs. Due to the time invested (9+years) in Nagios, we were able to get more components installed/configured easily than alternatives.

Incentivized

• As mentioned briefly previous there have been a couple of times where accessing servers at different sites due to point to point connectivity going down where this has been a big life saver
• Ease of management of servers
• Made deployment of applications rule based easier

Incentivized

• With it being a free tool, there is no cost associated with it, so it's very valuable to an organization to get something that is so great and widely used for free.
• You can set up as many alerts as you want without incurring any fees.

Incentivized