We compared Centreon and Nagios XI across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Centreon features a user-friendly interface with useful options for customization and manual configuration. Users like the solution’s flexible dashboards and the ability to create plugins. Nagios XI received positive feedback for its versatility and adaptability. It offers a diverse selection of plugins and scripts for monitoring needs.
Room for Improvement: Some Centreon users requested better documentation and more flexibility to customize reporting. Other areas for improvement include auto-scanning efficiency and integration. Users have suggested Nagios XI could improve integration, simplify configuration, and make the platform more user-friendly. Nagios XI users also suggest improvements to network visibility and cloud discovery.
Service and Support: Centreon is highly regarded for its prompt and knowledgeable customer service that offers support in multiple languages. However, some customers feel that the lower levels of support are inadequate. Some Nagios XI customers complained about the lack of chat or phone support options.
Ease of Deployment: Centreon's initial setup is described as time-consuming and complex. The deployment varies in duration depending on the IT infrastructure. Some Nagios XI users found the setup to be relatively simple, while others considered it challenging. Deployment can take a few months to complete, and there’s a steep learning curve.
Pricing: Centreon's cost depends on the company's size. It is affordable and suitable for small companies, but it can be costly to scale up. Nagios XI’s pricing is considered reasonable and transparent, with no extra charges.
ROI: Centreon delivers value by helping users identify and resolve critical issues fasters, which could yield large savings. Nagios XI users reported positive outcomes overall, but some said visibility limitations lower the solution’s ROI.
Comparison Results: Centreon is a flexible solution offering a range of customization options. The solution has earned high marks for support and affordability. At the same time, users say the setup can be complicated and time-consuming. Others said that auto-scanning and integration have room for improvement. Nagios XI is an affordable, flexible solution with a broad feature set and a selection of helpful plugins. At the same time, users say the setup can be complex, and some expressed a desire for more convenient ways to contact support.
"The single dashboard is a valuable feature."
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"Centreon's most valuable features are preventative maintenance and cost-efficiency. Everything is monitored, and we get a log before the system fails. We have an opportunity to fix the issue and avoid downtime."
"I really like the filtering capabilities of it. You can easily tell what's critical next to what's okay, the state of the services. It's very easy to get the whole picture quickly."
"Another feature we use is Business Activity, which provides us with an end-user perspective when a service is down or isn't working correctly. This is helpful when monitoring the KPIs. When we see a device or server that isn't working, we find the root cause."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to build an abstraction of service visualization. You can add services to an entity called Business Activities and you can see the state of these activities."
"E-mail alert notifications are valuable."
"I find the product's scalability to be one of the most valuable features since it allows us to add unlimited devices for monitoring and to set up additional polling servers without additional license cost or downtime in our monitoring."
"Centreon helps me detect where the problem is quickly. When we resolve a problem quickly, this lowers our overall costs."
"It is decentralized, which is better, because you can reduce the load from a single system. Also, you get a better view because it's more independent. Then, for the management, it's nice because they have one central system. With that, they can manage all the other systems, as well. This means they don't have to configure each system by system. They can configure it from one single interface."
"Nagios XI is stable."
"The Script Module in Nagios is really easy to use and is really cost efficient."
"The features I've found the most useful are the plug-ins, the fact that you can connect almost everything to it. That's very useful."
"It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability."
"Nagios is a custom API manager, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature."
"Nagios is stable and it's easy to use the monitoring software, which is why we chose this product."
"The most valuable feature is the dashboard, where I can have a single screen that provides a summary for hundreds of servers."
"This is a very good solution and it is simple to use, for any company."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The technical support needs improvement."
"Centreon introduced network discovery in the most recent update. However, it doesn't work well. Our previous monitoring tool could discover networking equipment on the network and identify the relationships between the devices."
"Centreon is very bad with auto-scanning. It's very monolithic software. It doesn't have microservices and it only has basic clustering. You cannot, for example, have six or seven nodes for Centreon's cloud processes."
"Release management and quality of testing need improvement, because with each major upgrade we have many issues coming in. Then, it takes several minor upgrades to get rid of them."
"I think Centreon's security could be improved by leveraging AI. That's where things are heading in the industry."
"Centreon is actually missing an easy way to create a trendline for the metrics. Actually it is possible to create it, but you need a good knowledge of math, Centreon, and RRD."
"I would like to see more plugins. That is something it needs. There is also room for improvement through dynamic thresholds, or self-discover thresholds. I would also like to see a discovery feature that could map the whole network environment and automatically suggest things."
"I went through a few things with them to do with Centreon MAP, to do with active polygons, being able to draw an area and make that active. The functionality was in the older version of Centreon MAP and in the new version, which was a complete rewrite, they dropped it."
"The problem with the reporting is you have to configure the report, and after that, you will have the same report every month, every week, every day. You have to sync it in order to have a great report."
"Improve the documentation, examples, and best practices, therefore users can understand how to do things."
"We'd like to see more integration capabilities."
"The product's stability could be even better."
"I would like a much easier GUI so that I can delete events and logs, which will free up a lot of space."
"The installation and monitoring need improvement."
"The product could be optimized to improve the administrative user experience via the Nagios Core Configuration (NCC) GUI module."
"The Configuration Wizard needs improvement, because not all vendors are present."
"I would like to be able to extend it to all of our data centers, whether they are in the cloud or not. It would be helpful if I could connect everywhere."
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Centreon is ranked 11th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 27 reviews while Nagios XI is ranked 9th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 54 reviews. Centreon is rated 8.6, while Nagios XI is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Centreon writes "Proactive reporting guides our NOC on what needs to be fixed, saving them time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nagios XI writes "Great for monitoring IT services infrastructure with nice tools and helpful notifications". Centreon is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, Nagios Core, Icinga and Datadog, whereas Nagios XI is most compared with Nagios Core, Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, Wireshark and Nagios Fusion. See our Centreon vs. Nagios XI report.
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We monitor all IT Infrastructure Monitoring reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.