Nagios Core to Nagios XI: A Roadmap for Making the Upgrade

IMPORTANT NOTE: As of Nagios XI 5.8, users now have the ability to automatically migrate their Nagios Core data to Nagios XI. See “Automatically Migrating Nagios Core to Nagios XI” for more information.

If you’ve been a Nagios Core user for a long time, migrating to Nagios XI, the enterprise version, may seem daunting. However, we’ve made it simple for Nagios Core users to upgrade to the enterprise network monitoring platform. Follow the steps below and reference Nagios’ Knowledge Base to ensure a smooth transition from Nagios Core to Nagios XI.

1. Setup a Nagios XI Test Environment Using the Free 30-day Trial

Nagios offers a 30-day free trial of Nagios XI. The setup is easy—it only takes 20 minutes to download and start monitoring devices, servers, and applications. The trial gives you 60 days to get familiar with Nagios XI. Test how your devices interact with the interface and explore the dashboards, reports, and other tools. We encourage you to explore the 70+ monitoring wizards to see just how easy it is to configure new devices.

Also included with the trial is a QuickStart session, which is one hour of free help from Nagios tech support. Take advantage of this session to get your questions answered before you officially upgrade.

2. Migrate Your Data to the New Nagios XI Instance

Once you’re familiar with Nagios XI, it’s time to spin up the production version of it and start migrating data from your Nagios Core instance. If you have a virtualization platform, you can use Nagios’ pre-packaged virtual machine to install Nagios XI in just three minutes.

It’s a common misconception that Nagios Core users can’t migrate their existing data to Nagios XI. Not only is this inaccurate, but we’ve built an efficient process to make this migration as easy as possible for you. Refer to our Migrating from Nagios Core guide for a seamless transition.

3. Finalize Setup and Verify Nagios XI is Functioning Properly

After your Nagios Core data is successfully migrated to your new Nagios XI instance, set up user permissions using Nagios XI’s multi-tenant views. These views enable you to control which employees can see what within the product, so employees only see the information that is relevant to their job. After users are set up, choose who gets alerted if things go awry.

Once set up, verify that the instance is functioning correctly by checking that hosts and servers are transmitting data as expected and that Nagios XI is receiving the information needed to monitor effectively.

4. Decommission Your Nagios Core Instance

The final step when migrating to Nagios XI from Nagios Core is to decommission your Nagios Core instance once the migration is complete. This is as simple as powering off the old Nagios Core instance.

Nagios XI was built on top of Nagios Core, so when you upgrade, you don’t lose any of the power of Nagios Core. Nonetheless, it can be overwhelming to migrate from a product you’re familiar with to something new. Nagios makes migrating to Nagios XI easy for you. Once you’re up and running on Nagios XI, we know you will quickly see the time- and cost-saving benefits of our enterprise monitoring platform.

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