Freshping (discontinued) vs. Nagios Core

Freshping is suitable for anyone looking for a service to monitor the status of applications without much trouble and effort on it. The free tier will sure be enough for a lot of users. I wouldn't recommend this if you need very customized checks to define being up or down of course, or a very custom status page.

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

• The UI is neat. It's very easy to use, and with lots of information.
• It's very easy to set up.
• The "badge" feature is interesting for showing up on institutional website.

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

• Better integration with Freshservice to generate tickets
• Monitor internal systems
• Better ability to customize

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

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

It's perfectly easy and straightforward to use. There's no need to read documentation, you just register and will surely be able to configure whatever monitor you want to set up. It's also very easy to use other features like the status page, reporting, alerts, etc.

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

To date we have had no need of support from Freshping, it has just been that easy to use. It is highly intuitive and self-explanatory.

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

We did not choose Freshping over these, we selected it as an additional tool in our toolset. It is important to have multiple angles of monitoring, and FreshPing was a natural addition because of its integration with our existing trouble ticketing solution and it being completely free to use. Compared to PRTG, it is much easier to create a systems status/uptime page for the end users to view.

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

• Good visual for end users
• Adds another check to verify uptime/outages
• Cost for us was free, so we had nothing to lose by adding it

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