Nagios XI For Nagios Admins

Product Feature Comparison

Wondering how you can leverage Nagios XI to further expand your monitoring capabilities and benefit your IT team and organization? Looking for a quick comparison of features Nagios XI provides over Nagios Core?

Download the following datasheets for a quick overview of why Nagios XI is right for your organization:

Monitoring Product Feature Matrix
Nagios XI Features

Reasons For Choosing XI

Here are just a few reasons we've heard from existing Nagios Admins as to why they're bringing Nagios XI into their infrastructure:

• Built On Nagios. You can leverage your existing knowledge of and investment in Nagios Core in an XI deployment. No need to learn something completely new or lose the flexibility you've come to love with Nagios. You can continue to leverage custom and community plugins, event handlers, and addons that you're using

• Simplifies Administration. Nearly every Nagios Admin we've chewed the fat with over the years with has expressed a desire to empower end-users to manage their own monitoring configuration.  Our new configuration wizards, along with an advanced web config GUI, let you grant control to mere humans so you can get back to wielding your magic pixie dust in the server room and wiring closet.

• Power Meets Beauty. You don't need a GUI.  You're a master of the command line and can wield shell scripts to automatically reconfigure routers and turn off the lights like nobody's business.  But your management team and customers need a nice looking interface.  Something that integrates monitoring data with performance graphs, ticketing systems, and a whole bunch of other IT data and systems.  We've created a new UI framework that provides for that.  You'll love it too, but we promise not to tell anyone.

• User-Specific Customization. Our new UI provides for user-specific customization, including custom dashboards, views, and preferences.  We'll continue to design and build XI with an enhanced user experience in mind.

• Extensible. Just as with Nagios Core, you can modify, extend, and enhance Nagios XI and its underlying components to meet your needs.  Create custom configuration wizards, dashlets,  components, or plugins to extend XI's functionality and tailor it to your organizational requirements.

• Low-Level Capabilities. We know many of you have tweaked Nagios Core in some very unique ways over the years to solve your monitoring and organizational challenges.  We think that's awesome.   We'll continue to support your requirements for low-level access to core components and work with you to develop tools and extensions to make life easier for you and your team.

Powerful Nagios Configuration Management

Managing your Nagios configuration is an important task as an administrator. With XI you've got some powerful options on your side. Use the XI configuration wizards, advanced web config interface, or manually-maintained config files to configure Nagios XI. Or mix and match - you've got options.

Configuration Wizards

Native configuration wizards guide users through the process of monitoring new devices, services, and applications without having to understand complex monitoring ideas or modify low-level configuration files.

Advanced Configuration GUI

Nagios XI includes an advanced web config interface with a database backend for easy config management from anywhere. And you still retain the ability to define templates and use inheritance for advanced setups. Awesome!

Manually Maintained Configuration

With XI you can still maintain some or all of your configuration in manually-maintained configuration files. This allows you to integrate custom config-generation methods (such as CVS/SVN exports) with your XI installation.

Importing From Nagios Core

The Nagios XI web config manager includes import functionality, which means its easy to move configuration files from existing Nagios Core installations into XI for easier management.

Failsafe Snapshots

You don't want your monitoring server to break if someone makes a configuration error. XI makes snapshots of your configuration and automatically rolls back to the most recent last known-good state if it detects a configuration error. Snapshots or errors and problematic configuration files are captured for your to review for later problem resolution.

Nagios XI Components

We designed Nagios XI to utilize some of the most well-known and well-respected Nagios components and addons.  Many Nagios shops make use of these tools in their installations, so you may already be familiar with them.

Some of the core Nagios components and addons we include in the XI distribution include:

• Nagios Core for the monitoring engine

• Nagios Plugins for application, service, and metric monitoring

• PNP for native RRDTool-based graphing of monitoring engine data

• NagiosQL for the basis of an advanced web config GUI

• MRTG with RRDTool for interface bandwidth monitoring

• NDOUtils for the monitoring engine database backend