Nagios

Nagios
	‎
Original author(s)	Ethan Galstad
Developer(s)	Nagios Enterprises, LLC
Initial release	March 14, 1999; 25 years ago
Stable release	4.5.2 (April 30, 2024; 6 months ago) [±]
Preview release	none [±]
Written in	C
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Asset management software; Network management software
License(s)	GNU General Public License
Website	Nagios.org

Nagios (referred to as Nagios Core officially) is a popular open-source web-based network monitoring and asset management software application. Nagios offers complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services, and it watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong and again when they get better. Nagios was originally designed to run under Linux, but now also runs well on other Unix variants.

A commercial version of the software called Nagios XI is also available by the development team Nagios Enterprises.

Product history

Nagios, originally created under the name NetSaint, was written and is currently maintained by Ethan Galstad, along with a group of developers actively maintaining both official and unofficial plugins. Nagios is actually a recursive acronym: "Nagios Ain't Gonna Insist On Sainthood",^[2] "Agios" is also a transliteration of the Greek word άγιος which means "saint."

NetSaint was first released by Galstad as version 0.0.1 in March of 1999^[1], thinking "there might be approximately one dozen other people who might be interested in the application."^[2] A corresponding SourceForge project was set up for NetSaint on May 3, 2001.^[3] In March 2002, the final release under the "NetSaint" name took place as version 0.0.7.^[1], followed by a name change to "Nagios" due to a trademark dispute over the use of "Saint."^[4]

Nagios went on to win the June 2005 SourceForge Project of the Month award, with Galstad citing the critical work done by its contributors to the software and its plug-ins for its success.^[5]

Nagios Enterprises, the entity responsible for the software's development, revealed in March 2012 that its Nagios software was the winner of "Network Monitoring Application Of The Year" award in the 2011 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards, ^[6] after previously winning the award in 2007 and 2008.^[2]

Features

Major features of Nagios Core include^[7]:

monitoring of in-house and custom applications, services, and systems
detailed status information of IT infrastructure
e-mail and SMS support
alerts and event handlers
trending and capacity planning
flexible reporting
multi-tenant capabilities
user-based security
extendable architecture
scalability

Hardware/software requirements

Base requirements for the installation of GLPI include:

a machine running Linux (or UNIX variant) that has network access
an installed C compiler if installing from source code
if not using Nagios' included CGIs, a web server (preferably Apache) and Thomas Boutell's gd library version 1.6.3 or higher

More information about the requirements for installing the core Nagios software can be found in the documentation.

Videos, screenshots, and other media

You can take a tour of Nagios screenshots on the website.

Videos about the Nagios software line can be found on the Nagios YouTube channel. Additional links to multimedia concerning Nagios can also be found on the Nagios site.

Demos of Nagios software can be accessed here.

Entities using Nagios

Examples of entities that use Nagios include:

AT&T, British Oceanographic Data Centre, CERN, Comcast, DHL, Idealab, International Committee of the Red Cross, L'Oreal, Linksys, MCI, Müller, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Oxford University Library Services, Peavey, Portland State University, Presbyterian Healthcare Services, Puig, Research Studios Austria FG, Shell, Siemens Healthcare, Toshiba France, United Agri Products, United Drug, Yahoo!

A full directory of Nagios users and testimonials can be found at the Nagios website.