2. What Makes a Good Alternative to Nagios?
Nagios has been a critical “getting started” monitoring system
A large user base has voiced many Nagios likes, dislikes, for its
strengths and weaknesses
Five distinct needs are driving migrations from Nagios
1. Better User Interface
2. Easier Deployment, Maintenance, & Integrations
3. Improved Analytics, Alerting, Reporting, & Historical Data
4. Mobile Apps
5. Reduced Hardware Costs
3. #1 Better User Interface
The Nagios UI designed to be a basic, utilitarian console
Supports lowest common denominator of monitoring
Most operations teams responsible for service levels and uptime
have specific needs
A more modern UI, purpose-built for cloud monitoring
Typical “uh-oh” events trigger Nagios replacement search
An outage occurred and Nagios limitations hung you out to dry
Original Nagios developer left the company – now what?
Your business has matured to the point you need a monitoring
solution you can count on – one that is fully supported and was
professionally engineered with a UI to match.
1 The 5 key impacts analyze IDC’s key 2013 predictions and analyze the resulting impact on IT management
4. #2 Easier Deployment, Maintenance, & Integrations
Nagios has been a DIY dream and a cool hobby shop project
But you must have the time and inclination to manage your own
management system
Installation and customization time
Usually measured in days or weeks, not minutes or seconds.
“It's going to take you a long time to get used to setting up Nagios to
begin with…”
Ongoing maintenance costs and integration pain
Developer takes ownership of ongoing maintenance, customization,
and integrations
For example, Puppet, Chef, HipChat, GitHub, PagerDuty, Campfire,
Twitter DM integrations are possible, with work
5. #3 Improved Analytics, Alerting, Reporting, & Historical Data
What does it take to make your monitoring job easier?
Features that automate and simplify the troubleshooting process: auto-trending, system
and app health, alerts when you have a problem, and historical analytics
Context: the essential cloud monitoring weapon
Allows you to look back in time determine what else was going on at the same time
How easy is it to determine were other systems in the same AWS region or availability
zone having problems?
What about other similar systems in the same cluster?
What’s happening with the related instances supporting the same application?
Nagios not designed for automation and simplification
Doesn’t automate the tagging, presentation, alerting, and reporting that’s required to
simplify and accelerate the troubleshooting process.
6. #4 Mobile Apps
Lack of a full-featured Nagios mobile app can be a non-starter
Push-based, native iOS app or native Android app is a must-have for most devops
A few mobile solutions for Nagios do exist
Lack the requisite depth and flexibility for everyday
The more you customize Nagios, harder it is to get mobile support
7. #5 Reduced Hardware Cost
Problem #1: dedicating a Nagios cloud server instance inside AWS, etc.
Monitoring your own cloud infrastructure with your own cloud infrastructure
is dangerous
Taking on risks that monitoring is designed to reduce
Problem #2: paying for the instance plus managing the software, too
Problem #3: no resilience to network accessibility or local outages
Would need to build in redundancy across zones and regions
Problem #4: no customer experience or real user monitoring view
available that looks from the outside back in.
8. How Do I Learn More?
1. Check out this detailed comparison cheat-sheet table:
http://copperegg.com/nagios-alternative/
2. Try out CopperEgg for free and compare to Nagios
Start an unlimited 14-day trial
3. Visit CopperEgg to learn more: http://copperegg.com/