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.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"We have all our tickets inside Centreon in real-time and can monitor a lot of ELP and CLN in real-time for application purposes."
"We are alerted on service impacts and not when something is down. We have saved a lot of time on non-business-hours intervention."
"For servers and for applications, it was very, very efficient."
"The downtimes feature is helpful. If the ISP is doing some maintenance on its network, we have the option to put downtime on the devices or the services, so we won't get any false alarms."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The customizable reports and dashboards are really flexible. We started this partnership with Centreon, when we were looking for a solution, because of the flexibility of the reporting. That's what we found to be most attractive in the solution. You can display the data as you want."
"Since this is an open source technology, if we are capable of writing the plugins in any scripting language, this product allows us to monitor anything we want."
"BPI: It allows defining peripherals to map business criticality for efficient monitoring, as required."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of processes."
"The most valuable feature is the dashboard, where I can have a single screen that provides a summary for hundreds of servers."
"Though I downplayed the administrative NCC GUI, this is by far the strongest aspect of the Nagios XI product."
"The dashboard allows you to see what's going on in the overall system."
"The most useful aspect of this solution is the ability to customize it for the client agent."
"It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"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."
"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."
"There are improvements that they need to make to their API. When we're using different systems and we want to disable monitoring for a specific server, we still can't do that through the API. That's something that's lacking."
"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."
"Improvements I would like to see include a discovery solution, better reports, and end-to-end monitoring."
"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."
"To get it started is a lot of work, since it comes empty. We had to push information into it to make it work."
"There is room for improvement in the area of artificial intelligence. The product gives us a lot of information, but it's only information. We want the product to do more auto-remediation."
"The product's stability could be even better."
"Nagios XI can improve its GUI for users with a new look."
"The way Nagios displays information isn't easy for a new user to understand. It's not intuitive enough. You need to read some tutorials or be trained to understand what it's displaying. Also, I think it needs more features to improve network visibility because there are some things you can't detect."
"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."
"The interface could be more user-friendly."
"The product could be optimized to improve the administrative user experience via the Nagios Core Configuration (NCC) GUI module."
"Improve the documentation, examples, and best practices, therefore users can understand how to do things."
"There's room for improvement in the visibility, and in the ability to extract information. Stuff like this should be more simple."
Centreon is ranked 10th in Network Monitoring Software with 27 reviews while Nagios XI is ranked 8th in Network Monitoring Software 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 Splunk Enterprise Security, whereas Nagios XI is most compared with Zabbix, Nagios Core, PRTG Network Monitor, Wireshark and OpsRamp. See our Centreon vs. Nagios XI report.
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