Today we'll be briefly going over some of the major differences between SolarWinds vs Nagios in terms of Infrastructure Wide Network monitoring, management, auto-discovery, inventory management and bandwidth analysis/monitoring.
Both of these software manufacturers have been the Network Monitoring realm for almost 20 yrs now and have revolutionized the way we monitor and manage network devices, servers, routers, switches and even mobile devices.
We're going to breakdown some of the differences between the two and compare features and capabilities to help you make a more informed decision on which one you should be implementing into your network.
Here's a Comparison of SolarWinds NPM vs Nagios for 2024:
| SolarWinds NPM | Nagios | |
|---|---|---|
| Automatically Map & Discover Network Devices (including Servers, Desktops, Routers, Switches, Wifi and more) | ✔ | Add-on Needed |
| Monitor Network/Computers via WMI, SNMP, Ping, etc | ✔ | ✔ |
| DB Monitoring Functionality including SQL Server, etc. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Wireless Network Monitoring (BYOB, etc) | ✔ | Plugin Needed |
| QOS (for VoIP, etc) Monitoring & IP SLA Reporting | ✔ | Plugin Needed |
| Network & Wifi Printer Monitoring | ✔ | Add-on Needed |
| Hardware Health Monitoring (CPU, Memory, Internal Temps, Disk Space, etc) |
✔ | ✔ |
| Environmental (Temp/Humidity) Monitoring | ✔ | Add-on Needed |
| Web Server Monitoring (IIS, Nginx, Apache, etc) |
✔ | Plugin Needed |
| Active Directory Domain Monitoring and Integration | ✔ | Plugin Needed |
| Cisco Netflow, Sflow, JFLOW, IPFIX Monitoring |
✔ | ✔ |
| Vmware & Hyper-V, Virtual Machine Monitoring | ✔ | Plugin needed |
| Server Performance, Speed, Downtime and Health Monitoring (Windows & Unix/Linux) |
✔ | ✔ |
| Application Monitoring | ✔ | ✔ |
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Pros & Cons
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor – FREE TRIAL
Pros:
- Supports auto-discovery that builds network topology maps and inventory lists in real-time based on devices that enter the network
- Has some of the best alerting features that balance effectiveness with ease of use
- Supports both SNMP monitoring as well as packet analysis, giving you more control over monitoring than similar tools
- Uses drag and drop widgets to customize the look and feel of the dashboard
- Tons of preconfigured templates, reports, and dashboard views
Cons:
- This is a feature-rich enterprise tool designed for sysadmin, non-technical users may some features overwhelming
Nagios
Pros:
- Open-source transparent tool
- Simple, yet informative interface
- Flexible alerting options support SMS and email
- Robust API backend makes it a great option for developers who want to integrate their own custom applications
- Very generous two-month trial period
Cons:
- Open-source version lacks quality support found in paid products
- Installation can be technical and complex
As you can see, Nagios needs a lot of Plugin's and Add-on's in order to complete the same tasks that SolarWinds can do natively out of the box.
We've seen this quite a bit with Nagios, and there are some features that SolarWinds simply out-performs Nagios in.
For most Network Admins, we like to setup and deploy software quickly via an Installer – further adding in our subnets and click the Auto-discover button for the software to automatically map and discover all nodes within our network.
SolarWinds has this feature set and can quickly inventory and start monitoring hardware health, uptime, bandwidth usage and more fairly quickly.
On the hand, Nagios will need a little more configuration on the back-end due to its config file setup and intricate setup procedures.
If you are happy with digging through files and configuring the software that way and want full control over the software you are implementing, than Nagios is a great option.
But if you are looking a more hands-off approach to help you get monitoring within Minutes rather than Hours, we strongly suggest you check out SolarWinds Network Performance monitor.
Many of the features we've mentioned above come pre-packaged within the software and as of recently, they've even included a Network Insights for Cisco ASA firewall that gives you the flexibility to dig into Cisco ASA's and understand whats happening on the edge of your network all within one dashboard.
On top of the features we mentioned above, SolarWinds also introduced a new feature within the last year or so called NetPath which maps out every Network Hop and analyzes latency, lag and possible bottlenecks that each network hop produces.
This feature lets you analyze, pinpoint and troubleshoot quickly and easily from within the dashboard.
In this case, We highly recommend SolarWinds for Network monitoring, management and Inventory control, as they have quite the offering and are continually adding innovative new features that you simply cannot find in many of these open-source alternatives.
Grab a 30 Day Free Trial download from Below and get the software installed to get a better understanding of how it performs in your network.
Download Free 30 Days:
https://www.solarwinds.com/network-performance-monitor
