Nagios Core vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

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

It’s best for troubleshooting issues that require a packet level analysis. By having source/destination you can have a view into how the packets are traversing the network. If alerts/baselines are set up it can help identify something out of the norm. Very useful for VoIP applications as well. Would not recommend for small scale environments.

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

• The graphical interface has to be the key benefit of NetScout. I am more of a packet analyzer but the interface gives the upper levels easier view into the network.
• The breakdown of sites is useful.
• The ability of the break the traffic down and go into the packet analyzer straight from the graphical interface. Saves a lot of time writing filters with just simple clicks.

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

• Better access to resources
• Pricing in this niche market is very high, hard for the little guy to take advantage of these solutions

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

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 provides a lot of useful information, but it's not always easy/intuitive to find it. It really needs to get a fully functional API integrated to support automation and integration with other monitoring and analytics tools to enable faster decision making. On the other hand, it gathers a lot of useful information from complex networks that are useful for capacity management and faster incident isolation and resolution.

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 have a dedicated OSE who has been very helpful. Besides that, we have little experience beyond this specific model

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

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is the best solution which we have encountered so far. The best part about this is that it can be integrated with various third party tool for more visibility and behavior analysis. The dashboard is loaded with a lot of useful features which gives the complete trend analysis of connectivity loss and network flaps and helps to identify the critical sites which is not present in other technology solution. This is an incredible network performance monitoring tool

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

• NetScout nGeniusONE helps to reduce the time and effort (people to involve) to react on network outages, speed up the investigation progress, and much more quickly to identify the root cause.
• Proactive helps the operation team to identify the underline problems and help the business to take actions before the issue starts to impact the customer's business. Help to reduce the incidents and outages.
• Help the operation teams to better understand the performance and health of the network from a higher level and end to end perspective, improve the efficiency of work.

Incentivized