Nagios Hero Stories

Hundreds of thousands of professionals worldwide find Nagios an invaluable tool in their daily work. Our favorite stories are the ones that show how much Nagios has helped an IT admin and their department or company.

Have your own story to tell about how Nagios helped make you an IT Hero?

Power Outages Can't Stop The National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Power outages happen. They're a fact of life for IT admins. And when they do, I turn to Nagios to see what's up, what's down and how long things have to live.

When a storm knocked out power to our leg of the local substation, our combined monitoring solution of a Sensaphone IMS-400 and Nagios Core alerted me to the power outage. By the time I got my home DSL up again, a quick glance at the Nagios status screen told me one of the UPSes in the router room had already failed. I began the shutdown procedure remotely, relying on Nagios to tell me what was still up. Eventually my remote connection died as the VPN server's UPS tanked. However, since Nagios sends SMS pages over a separate internet connection, I continued to get status updates on my mobile phone.

I knew from the last glance at my laptop that I had about an hour left on the main UPS. I drove in to the office and discovered 2 other admins had also been alerted and were responding on-site. We ran our shutdown checklist as quickly as possible, all the while Nagios reporting the status of our datacenter.

When our power came back the next day, we ran the startup checklist, starting with the Nagios server which we used to verify that we hadn't forgotten anything and that everything came back up smoothly. We had no data loss and we were all heroes!

Thank you, Nagios!

Josh Malone - National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Nagios Helps Empower People, Save Money at ValueClick

I came to ValueClick over 8 years ago to build the network operations organization which includes monitoring and notification for the company. I was tired of using "enterprise" monitoring solutions which just were not "open" and scalable for a companies needs. The company started using Netsaint, and quickly moved to Nagios when the upgrade was available.

Nagios has made me a hero within our company as its given us the ability to monitor and notify our real time ad serving environment, serving over 5 billion ads per day. We currently have over 15,000 elements within our Nagios configuration and through automation and great integration with our RT system we have designed and implemented a real-time notification engine for over 30 distinct escalation groups within the company. In addition, thanks to Nagios we are able to empower our over 300 engineers to develop their own monitoring checks and implement them into the Nagios system, giving us "best of breed" monitoring within the company.

We are most likely one of the largest online service based companies in the US, not requiring a 24X7 on-site team (NOC) thanks to complete automation and "accountable monitoring". This saves the company money and also puts the alert into the hands of the person responsible for fixing it.

Thank you Nagios!

Michael Lydon - VP, Network Operations @ ValueClick

Nagios Helps Keep It Cool at Columbus Museum of Art

We employ Nagios in-house because we're non-profit and the price is right! Nagios has saved the day many times for us. Here are a few examples.

We had servers in a closet due to lack of data center. We had a ceiling HVAC unit to cool the room and it would die often. We actually lost a server because of it. Well, we purchased a temperature sensor that works with nagios and installed it. Within the week the unit failed and we got an alert within 10 minutes because the temperature rose so quickly. We were able to get service for the unit quickly and come up with measures to lower the heat to keep things running. Certainly saved the day!

We also started monitoring our website with nagios because it would go down often and we wouldn't know it. So, with the monitoring in place, we get immediate text messages when it's down and we can notify our design company to kick it. This has been a life saver.

I don't think I could do my job without nagios.

Thomas Deliduka - Columbus Museum of Art

Nagios Empowers Users, Keeps Customers Happy at Sunrise Banks

Prior to having Nagios if any of our resources were down, we wouldnt know about it until the user or customer informed us that they were unable to do something. After dealing with several irate end users and customers we found Nagios. Then we were notified any time a resource was experiencing an issue before anyone even noticed. The downside was that without having everyone in the IT Dept knowledgeable in Linux, Nagios could only be managed by a few people. Then came the release of Nagios XI. It is so easy to use, even the managers can use Nagios now. They are able to add their own devices, alerts, etc. So now they dont have to rely on the few that know Linux to manage Nagios. That's how Nagios made me a hero!

Jared Bird - Network Administrator, Sunrise Banks

Nagios Helps AmberWyvern Studios Be Proactive

One of our clients was having difficulty tracking down random network events - disconnects, high latency, improper network usage, across their LAN and WAN. Their IT infrastructure had experience several upgrades in the 4 1/2 years we have been providing IT support services, including new T1s, new Cisco switches, fiber optic cable run to connect buildings in their CT headquarters, new domain controllers in CT and in their factory in MA. They wanted, nay, needed a solution that was both cost effective (especially in this economy), and quick to deploy.

Nagios fit the bill perfectly. Using a custom-built Linux box, running Fedora 11, and NSClient++ and several plug-ins for the Cisco switches, we have provided them unprecedented visibility of their IT infrastructure. Nagios provides a real-time status map of every aspect of their network, both in CT and in MA. Before we were only able to react to events and anomalies. Now we are proactively monitoring the network.

This yielded results! We found issues in their physical layer of their network; poorly terminated cable drops, several rogue hubs and switches employees put in place to share their network port, poorly configured NICs. Nagios made us a hero in the eyes of our client.

Thank you for creating such an awesome tool.

William Bulman - CEO, AmberWyvern Studios LLC

Nagios Saves News Year Eve For Admins at Argentina Economics Ministry

Some admins - including myself - have to work on New Years Eve. On December 31st of 2006 things went very wrong with our datacenter. I was at home at 3:00 pm and an SMS arrived. I thought that someone was sending nice happy New Year message, but i was wrong! Nagios was telling that the datacenter was going down because the power went out!

Thanks to Nagios I could solve the problem before midnight and celebrate New Year with my family!

Luis Aparicio, Ministerio de Economia - Argentina