Vendor Spotlight: Nagios

In 1999, Ethan Galstad came up with the idea of a system monitoring tool that could easily be extended, creating a core that others could add to, making it a very comprehensive and world-beating system over years of work. He chatted with other programmers on forums in the early days of the World Wide Web and gathered enthusiastic interest from his peers. Those others volunteered to join in and Galstad conceived a community of programmers, working together, each given a task to complete, allocated from a central plan.

The system that Ethan Galstad created was called NetSaint. The name changed in 2002 as the result of Galstad being sued by another company that already had a product with that name. Nagios is actually an acronym; it stands for “Nagios Ain’t Gonna Insist On Sainthood” – Nagios is actually one of the words that makes up the abbreviation, which is termed a recursive acronym.

Indisputably, Galstad wrote the core, the work of the other programmers who added their contributions with enthusiasm and for free went into a library of extensions, called plug-ins. So, Galstad was within his rights when he set up Nagios Enterprises, LLC, and moved the Core into the company in 2007. However, it was a little cheeky that he also moved the plug-in library without any word to the army of programmers who had written them for nothing.

Galstad didn’t shut down the Nagios code repository quickly enough and the slighted developers took copies and forked it. This resulted in a swarm of revenge rivals that flooded the market offering high-quality (and remarkably similar) alternatives to the soon-to-be re-minted Nagios. Among these adaptations were:

• Icinga
• Check_MK (now Checkmk)
• Naemon
• Shinken
• Centreon

There were many more forks, but those listed above are the ones that still exist. The presence of these similar systems that were available for free made Galstad’s plans to charge for Nagios difficult to achieve. The solution to this problem was to maintain the original open-source system as Nagios Core, which remained free to use. Alongside that solution, Galstad developed a more sophisticated system, called Nagios XI, a paid tool that has compiled code. The library of plug-ins was named Nagios Exchange and it retained open access without charge.

Founding and Background

Nagios Enterprises, the company behind Nagios monitoring software, was founded by Ethan Galstad in 2007. The company’s roots, however, trace back to 1999 when Galstad developed the initial version of Nagios as an open-source IT infrastructure monitoring tool.

The goal of the software was to provide a flexible and scalable solution to monitor networks, systems, and applications, notifying administrators when potential issues arise. Nagios rapidly gained popularity due to its modular architecture, which allowed users to extend its functionality with plugins, and its ability to monitor complex IT environments.

As demand for professional support, training, and more robust enterprise features grew, Galstad launched Nagios Enterprises to provide these services while continuing the development of the software. The company is headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, and focuses on delivering both open-source and commercial versions of the Nagios software. These include Nagios Core (open-source) and Nagios XI (commercial), along with various other products aimed at monitoring, alerting, and reporting.

Nagios Enterprises has since become one of the leading companies in the network monitoring space, serving businesses and organizations around the world with a focus on reliability and security in IT infrastructure management.

Timeline and Evolution

The evolution of Nagios from a small open-source project to a leading network monitoring platform spans over two decades. Here’s a detailed timeline that captures key milestones and developments in Nagios’ history:

• 1999: Ethan Galstad develops NetSaint, an open-source tool designed to monitor IT infrastructure, network devices, and services.
• 2002: Due to legal concerns over the “Saint” name, NetSaint is rebranded as Nagios. The project gains popularity in the open-source community for its flexibility, plugin system, and ability to monitor a wide variety of devices.
• 2003: Release of Nagios 1.0, marking a significant milestone in its adoption and maturity.
• 2005: As the popularity of Nagios grows, developers from the community begin contributing by creating additional plugins and extensions.
• 2007: Ethan Galstad establishes Nagios Enterprises to support the commercial development of Nagios and provide professional services, such as training and enterprise support.
• 2008: The company begins offering enterprise-level solutions, responding to the growing demand for more advanced features and support.
• 2009: Nagios Enterprises begins offering Nagios XI, a commercial version of the software with advanced features, a web-based GUI, and enhanced reporting aimed at enterprise clients.
• 2010: Release of Nagios Fusion, a centralized dashboard for managing multiple Nagios XI or Nagios Core instances. It provides a single-pane view of the entire monitoring infrastructure, useful for larger organizations with multiple systems to monitor.
• 2012: Nagios 4.0 brings significant performance improvements, especially for large-scale environments, thanks to optimizations in the core engine.
• 2013: Launch of Nagios Network Analyzer, which monitors network traffic, providing insight into network performance and security.
• 2014: Launch of Nagios Log Server, which provides centralized log management, enabling users to store, query, and analyze log data from multiple sources.
• 2015: Release of Nagios Incident Manager, an organizer for system management issues.
• 2016: Nagios XI 5.0 introduces an enhanced user experience with a more intuitive web interface, better reporting, and additional tools to simplify monitoring and alerting.
• 2020: Nagios XI 5.8 brings more integrations, better cloud monitoring features, and enhancements to scalability and performance. Nagios extends its capabilities to monitor both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure.
• 2023: Nagios evolves to offer more comprehensive monitoring solutions for cloud services, such as AWS and Azure, and containerized applications (such as Docker and Kubernetes). Also, integration with AI-based anomaly detection and more automation tools for alerting and self-healing IT environments.

Nagios continues to enhance its offering by integrating cutting-edge technologies like AI, machine learning, and automation into its monitoring stack. It is expected to keep evolving with the growing demands for observability across cloud-native environments, security monitoring, and deeper insights into IT infrastructure.

Key People and Company Ownership

Nagios Enterprises is a privately held company, and its key leadership revolves around its founder and key executives. Here’s an overview of the key people and ownership structure of Nagios Enterprises:

Key People:

• Ethan Galstad – Founder and CEO
  • Role: Ethan Galstad is the founder of Nagios and currently serves as the CEO of Nagios Enterprises. He originally developed the Nagios software (then called NetSaint) in 1999 and has been the driving force behind the company’s growth and product evolution.
  • Contributions: As the creator of Nagios, Galstad has been instrumental in shaping the vision of the company and its products, guiding Nagios from an open-source project to a comprehensive suite of monitoring solutions used worldwide. His leadership continues to influence the company’s strategic direction, product development, and innovation.

Ownership Structure

• Privately Owned: Nagios Enterprises is a privately held company, meaning its ownership is primarily held by Ethan Galstad and possibly other private stakeholders, though the company has not publicly disclosed detailed information about additional investors or shareholders.
• Founder-Led: The fact that Nagios is founder-led and privately owned allows the company to maintain control over its product development and business strategy without being influenced by external shareholders or investors. This independence has enabled Nagios Enterprises to focus on delivering consistent innovation and maintaining its open-source roots while expanding its enterprise solutions.

Leadership Focus

The leadership team at Nagios Enterprises is centered around continuing the growth of the Nagios ecosystem with a focus on customer satisfaction, enterprise support, and maintaining strong connections with the open-source community. While Ethan Galstad remains the public face and visionary behind the company, the leadership is supported by teams in development, customer service, and business operations.

Nagios Enterprises’ privately owned structure and dedicated leadership ensure that the company remains committed to delivering high-quality monitoring solutions to a global user base.

Locations

Nagios Enterprises is headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. This is its primary location, from where the company manages its operations, development, support services, and business activities.

While Nagios Enterprises operates globally, it does not maintain many physical offices worldwide. Instead, it leverages its digital infrastructure to serve a wide range of clients across industries and geographies. The company provides support, sales, and services primarily through its Minnesota headquarters, and it also relies on its network of partners and resellers to offer localized support and solutions to international customers.

Target Market and Customer Base

Nagios primarily targets businesses and organizations that require reliable, scalable IT infrastructure monitoring. Its flexible architecture, coupled with both open-source and commercial offerings, allows it to cater to a wide range of users, from small businesses to large enterprises across various industries.

Target Market

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs)

SMEs typically require cost-effective, customizable monitoring solutions for their IT infrastructure. These companies often lack large budgets for expensive enterprise monitoring tools.

Large Enterprises and Corporations

Large enterprises require comprehensive monitoring across multiple geographic locations, hybrid cloud environments, and complex IT infrastructures. These organizations typically need high performance, scalability, real-time alerts, and a wide variety of integrations.

Industries: Enterprises from industries such as banking, telecommunications, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and IT services heavily rely on Nagios to monitor critical infrastructure.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs)

MSPs provide outsourced IT services for businesses and require reliable, centralized monitoring to manage their clients’ IT infrastructures. MSPs typically monitor multiple clients’ environments from a single location and require multi-tenant capabilities.

Government and Public Sector

Government agencies and public sector organizations require reliable monitoring solutions for their critical infrastructure. These entities typically manage sensitive data and require enhanced security, compliance, and high uptime.

Educational Institutions

Universities, colleges, and research institutions manage large networks of computers, data centers, and services that need to stay operational to support academic activities. Cost constraints are a significant factor, making open-source solutions attractive.

Cloud Service Providers and Data Centers

Cloud providers and data centers need to monitor infrastructure that spans across physical, virtual, and cloud-based environments. They often require monitoring for both hardware (data center equipment) and virtual environments (cloud services, VMs, containers).

DevOps Teams and IT Operations

DevOps and IT operations teams require real-time monitoring, alerting, and automation to ensure application performance and high availability. They typically need integrations with CI/CD pipelines and tools for automated response to incidents.

Customer Base

Nagios has a global customer base that includes:

• Fortune 500 Companies: Many large corporations in sectors like finance, telecommunications, and manufacturing use Nagios for their enterprise monitoring needs.
• Tech Companies: Leading IT companies and service providers, including those involved in cloud services and SaaS offerings, rely on Nagios to monitor their IT infrastructure.
• Government and Public Agencies: National governments and public institutions use Nagios to monitor critical infrastructure and comply with regulatory requirements.
• Academic Institutions: Universities and research centers worldwide use Nagios for network and application monitoring across their campuses and labs.
• SMEs and Startups: Nagios is also favored by smaller organizations and startups due to its open-source version and scalability.

Key Differentiators for Nagios

• Open-source Flexibility: For smaller organizations or those with skilled IT teams, the open-source nature of Nagios Core offers a powerful yet free solution for monitoring.
• Enterprise-grade Solutions: For larger businesses, Nagios XI provides advanced features like reporting, dashboards, and customer support, while products like Nagios Log Server and Network Analyzer cater to more specific monitoring needs.
• Scalability: Nagios’ architecture supports scalability for companies of all sizes, making it appealing to enterprises and MSPs managing multiple environments.
• Customization and Integrations: With its plugin architecture and wide range of third-party integrations, Nagios can be tailored to suit specific monitoring needs across industries and environments.

Overall, Nagios’ broad market reach spans across multiple industries and organization sizes, offering both free and commercial options to meet different operational and financial needs.

Nagios XI is the flagship commercial product of Nagios Enterprises, designed to provide comprehensive monitoring and management capabilities for IT infrastructure. It builds on the strengths of the open-source Nagios Core while offering enhanced features, usability, and support tailored for enterprise environments. Here’s an in-depth look at Nagios XI, its features, benefits, and use cases.

Key Features:

• User-Friendly Interface: Nagios XI offers a modern, intuitive web interface that simplifies navigation and monitoring tasks.
• Customizable Views: Users can create personalized dashboards with widgets for real-time monitoring of critical metrics, graphs, and alerts.
• Multi-Environment Support: Monitors a wide range of devices and services, including servers, network devices, applications, and cloud services.
• Agent and Agentless Monitoring: Supports both agent-based and agentless monitoring, allowing for flexibility in how devices are monitored.
• Configurable Alerts: Users can set up alerts via various channels, including email, SMS, and integrations with other communication tools (e.g., Slack, PagerDuty).
• Powerful Reporting Tools: Provides advanced reporting features to generate detailed performance reports, historical data analysis, and SLA tracking.

Nagios XI was first released in 2009 as an enhanced version of Nagios Core. The package was aimed primarily at medium to large enterprises, IT service providers, and organizations that require robust monitoring solutions with user-friendly interfaces and extensive support options. Nagios XI can be deployed on-premises or in cloud environments, providing flexibility to organizations with different infrastructure needs.

Benefits of Using Nagios XI

• Enhanced Visibility: Offers a holistic view of the entire IT infrastructure, allowing teams to proactively identify and resolve issues before they affect end-users.
• Reduced Downtime: Real-time monitoring and alerting help organizations respond quickly to incidents, minimizing downtime and its impact on business operations.
• Improved Performance Management: Historical data and performance reports enable organizations to analyze trends, optimize resource allocation, and plan for future capacity needs.
• Cost-Effective Solution: While Nagios XI is a commercial product, it provides a cost-effective monitoring solution compared to many other enterprise-grade options, especially considering the depth of features and support.

Nagios provides a system of templates that, when selected, adapted, and activated, apply a security policy consistently across a network. The package easily integrates with various IT tools and services, such as ticketing systems, automation tools, and cloud services. Nagios provides a RESTful API for developers to build custom integrations and automate workflows.

Nagios Enterprises offers enterprise-level support, including phone and email assistance, ensuring quick resolution of issues. Users can access extensive documentation, online training courses, and certification programs to maximize their use of Nagios XI.

Use Cases for Nagios XI

1. IT Infrastructure Monitoring: Organizations use Nagios XI to monitor the health and performance of servers, network devices, and applications to ensure optimal performance and uptime.
2. Cloud and Hybrid Environment Monitoring: Nagios XI supports monitoring for cloud services and hybrid environments, making it suitable for organizations with cloud-based applications and infrastructure.
3. Managed Service Providers (MSPs): MSPs leverage Nagios XI to monitor multiple clients’ IT environments from a centralized dashboard, providing a comprehensive view of service availability and performance.
4. Security Monitoring: Nagios XI can be configured to monitor for unusual activities or security breaches within the IT environment, helping organizations enhance their security posture.
5. Performance Optimization: By analyzing historical performance data, organizations can optimize their IT resources, ensuring that applications run smoothly and efficiently.

Other Notable Products

1. Nagios Network Analyzer

Nagios Network Analyzer is a powerful tool designed to provide deep insights into network traffic, helping organizations monitor bandwidth usage, detect security threats, and troubleshoot network issues. With its intuitive web-based interface, it allows users to capture, analyze, and store network flow data (such as NetFlow, sFlow, jFlow, and IPFIX) in real-time, offering a clear view of traffic patterns and usage trends across the entire network.

Advanced reporting and alerting capabilities make it easy to track specific traffic types, identify potential bottlenecks, and ensure that critical services are not impacted by network slowdowns or malicious activity.

One of the key benefits of Nagios Network Analyzer is its ability to integrate with the broader Nagios ecosystem, complementing the monitoring capabilities of tools like Nagios XI and Nagios Core. This integration enables centralized management of both network and system monitoring, providing a unified view of an organization’s IT infrastructure. For businesses and IT administrators, the tool is valuable not only for maintaining network performance but also for strengthening security, as it allows for early detection of unusual or suspicious traffic.

2. Nagios Log Server

Nagios Log Server is an enterprise-grade solution for log management and analysis, designed to centralize, store, and analyze log data from across an organization’s IT infrastructure. With its easy-to-use web interface, Nagios Log Server allows users to query and visualize log data in real-time, enabling efficient troubleshooting and fast identification of potential issues, such as application errors, security threats, or system failures.

The package supports a wide range of log formats and sources, including servers, applications, and network devices, making it a comprehensive tool for managing logs from diverse systems in a single platform.

Nagios Log Server has alerting and reporting capabilities, which allow administrators to set up custom alerts based on specific log patterns or conditions. This makes it easier to proactively address issues before they escalate, enhancing both security and operational efficiency. The system is able to handle large volumes of log data by distributing the load across multiple instances. When integrated with other Nagios products, such as Nagios XI, it provides a powerful, unified view of both system performance and security, offering organizations a more complete solution for infrastructure monitoring and management.

Major Competitors

1. Zabbix An open-source monitoring tool known for its scalability and flexibility. It monitors a wide range of metrics, including networks, servers, cloud services, and applications. Features include real-time performance monitoring, alerting, and customizable dashboards. It supports distributed monitoring and integrates with popular tools like Grafana. Like Nagios Core, Zabbix is free and open-source, making it a popular choice for companies looking for cost-effective solutions with enterprise-grade features.
2. Prometheus An open-source monitoring tool designed for reliability and scalability in cloud-native environments. It is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is widely used for monitoring Kubernetes clusters and microservices. This system provides time-series data, event-based monitoring, and a powerful querying language called PromQL. It integrates with Grafana for data visualization. Prometheus is ideal for containerized environments, making it a strong competitor in DevOps and cloud infrastructures where Nagios is also widely deployed.
3. Icinga An open-source monitoring tool that originated as a fork of Nagios. It offers similar monitoring capabilities but with a more modern architecture and interface. Icinga monitors networks, cloud services, and infrastructure, and it supports distributed monitoring. It has a web-based interface and better integration options compared to Nagios Core. As a fork of Nagios, Icinga targets users who want the flexibility and plugin architecture of Nagios but with a more modern interface and additional features. It is a natural alternative for organizations already familiar with Nagios.
4. Zenoss An IT monitoring platform that combines network, server, and application monitoring in a unified tool. It is known for its hybrid IT infrastructure monitoring capabilities. Zenoss provides deep visibility into both physical and virtual environments, offering event correlation, predictive analytics, and root-cause analysis. Zenoss targets enterprise customers looking for a comprehensive IT operations management (solution, providing predictive monitoring and analytics, which can be an alternative to Nagios XI.
5. Checkmk An open-source and enterprise-level IT monitoring tool. It offers comprehensive monitoring for servers, networks, containers, cloud infrastructure, and applications, with a focus on scalability and ease of use. The package is known for low resource consumption, even in large environments. Its automatic discovery of services and systems reduces the need for manual configuration. While Nagios requires more manual setup and configuration, Checkmk excels in offering easier out-of-the-box usability with its auto-discovery features. However, Nagios has a larger community and plugin ecosystem, providing more customization options.

Spotlight Wrap-Up

Ethan Galstad caused havoc when he created Nagios Enterprises and took the Nagios system private. The path he trod to commercialize his open source project is one that has been followed by other technologists with a hot free tool to use. ElasticStack, Splunk, Graylog, and Checkmk have all faced the same dilemma. Fortunately, Nagios survived the controversy and is still available in a fully funded free version alongside its income-generating edition.